BlowFish

Are you being ironic when you introduce this as a simple notation? If Anyone wants to read about this simple sequence I would recommend Rollo Tape (a pen name of Wyckoff) or Humphrey Niel. This is a great example of pseudo technical mumbo jumbo obscuring simple concepts rather than aiding them. Volume tends to rise when price is moving with trend and Volume tends to fall with corrections. When you get an increase of volume on a correction beware when you get falling volume with advancing price beware. The other important concept is the volume climax as this model does not cater for this I will leave that aside too. Of course if you like making up mumbo jumbo lets call rising price Tuesday and Falling price Wednesday and Rising volume April and Falling volume June Then TA WA TJ WA TJ shows a potential change of trend up to down and TA WJ TA a retracement. This imho is a far superior annotation to the one proposed by ehorn (no serioudly it is!) If you look at the couplets I have proposed they have absolutely the same meaning regardless of context they are consistent. You will see the one proposed by Ehorn change with the context of uptrend or downtrend....no wonder people get confused...absolutely daft).

There are many ways to get to the end of the garden path. The simplest is to simply walk down it. Or you can buy a compass an altimetre a rocket pack and jet off, to your nearest helipad take a chopper to your closest airport, fly to chile, follow the high andes down the spine of S America, catch a slow boat to china, take the trans siberian express to central europe.........snipped for brevity......and finally take a taxi to your garden gate where you will find the end of the path. Some methods will get you where you need to go but they are akin to the second journey. Some methods are as simple as following the garden path. Some journeys are capable of being taken by a 9 year old unsupervised (see elsewhere on TL for examples) Some will be incompleteable by all but the hardiest of souls. It all depends which is more important to the individual, the journey or the arriving. Personally I would be wary of any approach that uses a lingua franca that is shrouded in incorrectly used pseudo scientific terms to lend gravitas all at the expense of clarity of communication. I would (always) be wary of approaches that use the word 'always' a lot, especially when in reference to what price might do next. Undoubtedly this will engender frustration in mere mortals who do not see the future.

I wonder about 1. I have spent a fair amount of time trying to undertand fractals and there application to financial data series. It seems pretty clear that a single fractal dimension can not describe financial data series. They are in fact multifractals i.e the fractal dimension is not constant. I wonder if it actually matters or not but refering people to investigate fractals is likely to add to their confusion rather than bring clarity. It might help to spell out which properties are the important ones? Another one is Gaussian. Not only was Gauss prolific himslef many theories have 'gauss' in the title as subsequent mathmaticians honoured him. I wonder if it is to do with guassian distributions? (which would tie in with fractals). Financial data series absolutely do not have gaussian distributions. It may well have no baring on the effiacy of the method but it perhaps is no wonder people loose track when things are tied into reoneous 'pseudo maths'.

One question to ask ...are SQL databases good the best way to store sequential data? Answer is probablly no. Does it matter that much? The answer is again probabbly not. Chances are the yahoo group that was linked will give you a much better idea of pros and cons. Having chose SQl (which is certainly not wrong) then the only choice is which implementation to go with. To be honest I don't really know the current pros and cons, it's years and years since I have had to seriously evaluate DB products. Intuitivly an open source implementation seems to make sense for an open source project. There are many things that could blow that feeling right out of the water. Your preference is one of them

Look forward to seeing it as for 'checking your comment on tech analysis' I see none except that a load of your friends lost money trading Drummonds methods. Perhaps you popsted them somwhere else?

What Atto said. P&L can be made to 'work' but it is far from the easiest thing to grasp.

I don't know what TS provide history wise but I would be surprised if it really does offer 'all the data you could want'. For example can you can load every tick of the ES since ist inception for example (complete with proper time stamps:)). What about the DAX FTSE CAC, what about more esoteric instruments? Data management is a pain but at least if you do that yourself you know you really do have everything you could possibly want andthat it has been collected and stored accurately. I cant answer for Syzmone but why would you lock yourself in to an archaic propriatory product like TS? I presume the point of the project is so that you can connect your database to numerous data providers (including TS) and allow it to be queried by any client application that you can dream of. Don't get me wrong TS is a great product for quick prototyping of ideas but as the cornerstone of a project to collect and manage financial time series data wel :rofl: in fact TS as the cornerstone for any 'big iron' type project .....well no comment but good luck with that. I do agree with your comment on the choice of database. SQL isn't ideal in the first place but despite that is still adequate. Going open would seem to make more sense to me too.

Use flags for the sequence or increment a couter if slowk < 10 then ready = true; if ready and slowk > 20 then steady=true; if steady and slowk crosses above slowd then go; if go then buy..... If "any condition that invalidates setup" then reset the 'flags' incrementing a variable might be neater if slowk < 10 then tradestup = 1; if (tradesetup = 1) and (slowk > 20) then tradesetup = 2; if (tradesetup = 2) and (slowk crosses above slowd) the tradestup = 3; if tradesetup = 3 then buy..... The second approach is better for more sophisticated applications (you can model pretty complex stuff). This is a rudimentary 'state engine'. Finite-state machine - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

As you pointed out earlier, one of the intresting things was that it seemed clear that some where better emotionally equipped to trade.

Agree about 3, after a momentum move (perhaps more important to a scalper than 'trend') you might anticipate a 2 legged correction. Mind you I'd be wary of 5 too being at the top of a range. I also see trades between 5-6 and between 8-9. No time to annotate a chart right now, have company.

I am a great believer in prototyping Picked that up from my first boss when I needed to write firmware and software to utilise hardware my fellow researchers had designed. He would insist on writing a test suite first and then a prototype. The code would morph into the app anyway. This is one of the reasons I wasn't particularly bowled over by OOP, I was kind of used to writing re usable code. I do wonder why you picked 1 hour granularity to collect and store? Forgetting tick data for now nearly all applications (and data providers for that matter) provide and store data in chunks of 1 minute. Even if you only want hourly bars it makes sense to collect and store minute data (later perhaps ad tick data) and to aggregate them into hours. The only expense is a little more storage. I am not familiar with OEC's data feed api but it is likely not to be a question of expanding later but of adding code now to filter and aggregate minute data into hour bars and then removing it later. Hope you don't mind me bleating on about this but I think this is a fundememental design concideration that will actually add complexity to diminish utility. The visualisation stuff looks nice! A shame that open source stuff is relatively rudimentary though JFreecharts isn't too bad. I know a couple of people who have done great things with it. IB wasn't one of them! Have fun this weekend with the new software!

There are some nice Silverlight applications coming on line. Stocks are well covered but futures not so well. Wordens freestockcharts is pretty funky. Interesting times ahead.

If it is 'simple' spreads that you are after chances are MC will be adequate for your needs. Devil is in the detail of course, do you need watch lists of composites and that sort of thing for example.

The answer is the same as when you asked a week ago.

I hope it doesn't sound like I am trying to steer you towards Neoticker (in all its complexity!) but it seems to me it might do what you want 'out of the box'. For example it can even generate historical composites based on historical tick data of each constituent. Take a look at thier blog NeoTicker Blog | TickQuest | providing the latest technical analysis technologies if you drill down into recent entries it seems creating the composite is as simple as populating a list. If you search back, 'breadth' indicators are one of Laurences pet favourites and he has written several pieces on them. Regardless of whether Neo is appropriate for your requirements it would probably be an interesting read for you. Im talking myself into dusting it off

Just out of interest do you have a fairly clear set of requirements what you are trying to do or will you likely be doing a lot of ongoing research and general messing around? That might make a difference. If you can get what you need implemented done particularly easily in one application it might not mater so much to you that general 'messing' is a bit more complex. I have tried Ami some while ago, but there where a couple of specific things it wouldn't do that I required for what I was trying to implement. For that reason I did not use it for long. I think one was as stupid as a particular plot/visualisation that I needed. Can't remember exactly but while it was seemingly trivial it was a big hurdle to implementing what I wanted at the time. I also seem to recall that there where a couple of things that I didn't like about how it stored data. For the price though a fine package.

The problem is the internals of NT are quite sophisticated also most are exposed through the API. This means there is lots of 'calls' to learn. The architecture might be a bit challenging to a non programmer. Having said that you can program it in a variety of languages! It also has a formula language that is quite powerful in it's own right but simpler. I am not sure how composites are constructed.....it might be as simple as pointing at a watch list. I hope I am not leading you astray by suggesting it! You could always shoot them an email, they also have (or used to) a months trial. Though you might end up wasting a month to discover that it was too complex or that you just didn't like it.

Neoticker is a great product though it has a pretty steep learning curve compared to good old easy language it seems pretty hard to me! It is fast and flexible but you pay for that power by having a lot to learn. The main reason I stopped using it (many years ago now) was I had some data management issues with odd holes appearing in my tick data. Looking back it probably wasn't that big of a deal though it was irritating. Take a look at TickQuest Inc. NeoTicker® - Professional Traders & Analysts NeoBreadth halfway down the page. Though I don't want to distract you from what you are doing!

I didn't know that different charts used different threads,you live and learn. In the past 'IO' (receiving data, storing it and rasterising it) has been slugish (imo of course). Mind you the v5.0 patch notes mentioned significant improvements, 10 times for rasterising charts I believe. One way of looking at that is the old stuff was 'slow' well 10 times slower at least.

Didn't understand what you where talking about till this point (never having done a strategy) You could maybe use something like :- If conditions and not conditionslocked begin value1=high; conditionslocked=true; end; Obviously would need to unlock conditionslocked at some point. Maybe when you exit the position. If I have misunderstood ignore me...only skimming as strategy stuff has little appeal to me.

I was going to comment on that other place.....not worth the energy really. What form are you publishing the book in?

As an old supercharts user I appreciate it was very different in those days. You may be right, though MC certainly has odd bottlenecks (rasterising used to be very slow pre V5.0 not sure how it is now). Anyway I guess if you are going to do this sort of work Neoticker would be worth considering. The multi core stuff is mainly (only?) for optimising strategies I think? Some of the core tasks (receiving, storing and displaying data) still feel 'sluggish' to me. Having said that it would be fun to do the DJ 30 and see if that works efficiently. As an aside imho some of MC's biggest weaknesses are due to retaining old TS 'features' obviously EL is a massive plus point but some of the other architectural and UI design decisions where hampered by basing them on an ancient (for software) application.

I do try like most people, sometimes if I get out of the wrong side of bed I can be a bit prickly. The first 'important' thing is the 'with trend' idea. It's pretty much the same idea as trader Vic's 123. Until you get a trend line break and and a retest of the extreme trades in the direction of the trend are going to be much safer. No big secret its been mentioned several times in the thread. Of course if there is S/R there too so much the better. The second thing is the idea of 'failures' and the almost tacit assumption that the first time anything is tried it is more likely to fail than succeed. This directly leads to several of his trade ideas the one I liked the most is fading the micro trend line break. Lunch time so Im going to call a halt there for now

I seem to remember a couple of early posts of yours at ET. They where pretty succinct but also a fairly detailed account of your methodology. I probably have them in a bit bucket somewhere (though lord know where). Something like that might spark a bit of activity.

Not sure if one exists but it is unlikely to be that useful unless you can get real volume data. I'd be inclined to use futures data which probably means another charting package.