BlowFish

Not sure I completely buy into those MS. I have known a few people that have traded with hand drawn charts or even without charts, depends somewhat on your perspective. Trading simple price action from 5 minute bars doesn't require much in the charting department. Most retail stuff is fine unless you want to get into per tick analysis and then you are likely to hit a wall with most without some tricky programming. Neoticker being a notable exception that springs to mind. I guess the days of phoning orders in has pretty much passed but whilst having decent internet is a pretty good idea again depending on your approach it might not be that important. (For example 'swing' trading using market on open orders). Having said that for most traders this is likely to be pretty important Personally I would go a bit more existential....1) self discipline and 2) Honesty 3) Tenacity perhaps.

What I was thinking was something like if c data2 > h data2 then trigger= true else trigger = false; // data 2 is a 5 minute bar for example if (currententries=0) and trigger then buy next bar at open; //this will buy on the next tick if data 1 is a 1 tick bar I don't really use strategies myself but can't see why something like this would not work.

Why not use 2 data streams one to generate signals and a single tick one (of the same instrument) to generate trades?

Indeed. I really quite like what they are doing. If I could just buy the software for a grand I probably would. There pricing model is weird, 10 bucks a month per extra instrument? 500 (or whatever it is) if you want clusters shaded? Kinda crazy and firmly in the "lets make a living out of education and software". Another concerned is that just because there are no parameters exposed there clearly things that could/should be. It is a dark grey box that may well need tuning for different markets or conditions.

45% chance of identifying the start of a trend sounds all right to me. I am pretty sure one could make that 'work' in actual trading. If that really is the extent of your question you have answered it right there. There really is not much more to discuss. Of course there are far more interesting questions one could ask (many have been eluded to) e.g. how can I use context to improve these figures, can one trade these reversals successfully? how? etc. etc.

Have you thought of an ETF like the Spyders? or maybe CFD's (not sure they are available in the USA)

Minute resolution won't cut it. Check out getmachinetime.dll http://www.traderslaboratory.com/forums/34/volume-based-candles-how-profit-1414-7.html#post8036

I don't believe they are but if you apply delta data to P&F principles I think you will find your answer

Several random things occur to me (that's the trouble with hangovers). They are not that effective at illumination though will do at a pinch if the power is out. They do have a rather nice ambience however. The missus likes them she has about as many as the Vatican. What do you mean by 'work'. (That was a serious question) seems to me you are expecting something from them that they probably do not 'work' very well at. That does not mean that they might not work quite well at something else. This seems pretty important to establish if you want your question answered. Depending on exactly what you mean by 'work' I think the short answer may very well be no. Seems to me they are eminently more suitable as triggers rather than signals? One good thing about doing things programatically is you have to clearly define what they are (if the days close is a point away from the open is it still a doji for example, are long legged varieties special cases etc.)? What it does not do is to really make you think about what they really are. You don't want to skip that bit. Just because something does not 'work' (depending on what you mean by work) does not mean that you can not glean useful information from the test. Seems to me that the people that get value from them are not bogged down in candlestick dogma but simply use them as a visual aid to help them look at what is behind them.

The premise of the indicator is the intensity of the order flow often rises at these turning points. Of course all turns are not accompanied by increased intensity and all increases in intensity do not result in turns.....that is the nature of the beast though Not arrogant at all I am pretty sure you could find any one of four score and ten reasons. Of course the art is to identify it as it is happening.

Odd logic, I would be more inclined to conclude the opposite. Having said that the principle seems sound (to me) and it is a pretty straightforward an indicator to write (though I can't comment on Sierra).

This is something that is really quite important. Most of the approaches that start with the premise that trade direction can be determined by looking at the last price with respect to best bid and ask neglect this phenomena. An advance can be stopped by aggressive buyers running out of steam or by passive sellers standing firm.

Thanks sadly I no longer have access to the TS forums if there are release notes with the .DLL's perhaps someone might cross post them. (Presuming they are public domain rather than for sale).

Can you point me in the right direction? googling a couple of obvious permutations returned nothing.

Go to places with decent infrastructure. Internet, phone (fixed line and mobile). Stay in places that have those bases covered. Expect more issues than you would get at home regardless, there will always be a cleaner that unplugs the router to vacuum reception. Get a broker who answers the phone on the first ring. Consider ones that have data centres in different parts of the world. A backup broker is never a bad idea wherever you are. Make sure you use appropriate orders.e.g Market for entry (in case you get an outage with a resting limit order at the exchange). Have a resting limit order and stop for exit (same reason but for when you are in a trade). Make sure your style is 'compatible' with the connections available. Some approaches are more robust. For example if you are entering based on an hourly bars close and holding for 3 day swings it probably wont trouble you too much if the internet is out for 10 minutes. Get a nice laptop that can play games on too!

This will preserve your indents and make things easier for people to read.

in tradestation it would be something like plot1( close of data1 - close of data2); with the two components of the spread applied to the chart. you could weight them by multiplying by a constant or variable. I think tams has posted something that might fit the bill in the indicator section.

TTM have been known to 'borrow' indicators from the public domain and sell them so there is a good chance you will find what you are looking for. Not sure why some people consider them 'good guys'....just slightly better snake oil salesmen imho.

Rockstar make some decent games. I only recently picked up GTA and quite enjoyed it (beautifully crafted). I'll probably give this a crack too. Mind you I play way to many games. Messing around with Starcraft II beta atm, Im pretty hopeless (currently).

Yeah the spreadsheet should be a good template if you can get the data in, please do post it if you get it going.

I think he meant Armageddon, holocaust is far too tame. I am all for colorful language but perhaps not in headlines (if you want to be taken seriously).

Raj another way to look at things is from the point of view of the size of moves you want to capture and your risk tolerance. As the distance between VWAP & SD deviation is a measure of volatility and also the minimum size move you might anticipate you can 'tune things' with respect to what you would like to achieve. Edit: hopefully that gives some clues to your follow up question the basic, scalp and swing trading threads have similar characteristics the main difference being the sample size and hence the magnitude (between bands) and the time taken to complete that movement (50 point moves tend to take longer than 5 tick moves after all). Pick what suits you. (I think Jerry mentionde his favourite, can't remember tbh).

The trouble is IB data is pretty much useless for that type of work It's absolutely fine for most 'regular' charting but the volumes they quote are aggregated/coalesced and bear little relationship to actual trades. They don't even report all volume at the correct price (though it does get reported). I am not sure what they quote for bid ask 200ms snapshots (at best) is my guess. As I said fine for most charting type apps but not for the sort of analytics you are after JD.

Yeah I quite liked it too. Not really much concise information about reading the DOM out there.Of course it depends on what your objectives are. If you are not interested in scalping a few ticks or in gauging order flow (again in the tick to tick time frame) then it might not be of interest.

Auto trading seems flavour of the month. Personally I would not trust any of the off the shelf solutions unattended. Far too many things to go wrong, personally I'd want it running in a rack in a data centre somewhere. I have never used strategy runner but if you can code your strategy in there language you can run it on a brokers sever (if you pick one thats supports strategy runner).