BlowFish

As long as you collect data and store it in MC's database over time you can build your own history. The 30 days really is the maximum you can go without backfilling (if you manage your own data) so maybe adequate. If you go that route back up your MC database every couple of weeks or so!!!! What spout FX, Spot or futures? That makes a big difference imho.

What is 'enough' varies person to person. IQfeed is a good value feed but last I looked they only provide 30 days of tick history. If all you need is 1 minute bars of course that's not a problem. maybe you don't need history at all (I have maintained my own data for the longest time though multicharts does trash it now and then) Horses for courses and all that. Mind you the OP made no mention of historical data but that is definitely one of the (numerous) things to consider. Does IQfeed provide FX? I presume the OP is talking about spot FX, maybe some clarification on that and historical data requirements?

Oh O the forum police have arrived.:rofl: The practical applications of using multiple time frames (can we say MTF's?) are (imo) extremely powerful. Lets take a hypothetical trader that is attempting to catch intra day swings that might last under an hour to all day depending on market conditions. He's attempting to trade from (or close to) daily high to daily low (and back again) if the opportunity arises. If he squashes up his chart or maybe calls up a higher time frame chart (perhaps hourly daily or weekly) he is in essence looking at a higher time frame. (When taken in reference to what he is trading i.e daily swings. He is looking farther out than his trading focus is if you like) This gives him a bigger picture at the expense of some detail. Many people do this either consciously or not to get some context for there trades. Areas of potential support and resistance are likely to be more significant if they have been tested and proven (or even broken) over the course of days or even weeks or months. They are likely too be 'stronger' than levels that have formed over minutes or even seconds. Looking at the bigger picture can give 'better' areas to trade against. Conversely if price is in an area where our trader is interested in taking a trade and he calls up a faster chart than the one he watches routinely. Then he is looking at a lower time frame. He has given up some of the picture to examine the detail. The main reason to do this is to 'trigger the trade' or to try and read whether the area he is interested in is holding or breaking in (or closer) to real time. There is a potential danger, there is a tendency to remain 'zoomed in' for too long so he effectively ends up trading smaller swings, his focus has changed. I think this is a common malaise. Of course there is nothing new here though it is probably worth mentioning Charlie Drummond who has arguably put forward the most rigorous and complete framework for multi time frame analysis. Still going strong in his 70's. Sadly his work is not in the public domain though some of the ideas have slipped out. There got through the whole post without mentioning fractals....oh sh*t it just slipped out.

Zenfire is live data feed and order execution engine. It has never offered historical data regardless of charting software. I think people might get confused as if you use Ninja they record historical Zenfire data on their servers and provide that as a service to their customers. Edit - currencies might be a problem. I use IB for spot FX and despite them drawing criticism for aggregating ticks they are actually pretty good for FX though they do not save historical tick volume for some reason. IB's data is solid and clean you just wont get every tick. This may or may not be acceptable to you. IB's data has been discussed at length elsewhere at Traders Laboratory.

It seems the prop model has evolved and matured now. I remember the early days when the London arcades where happy to churn traders and simply take desk fees and commissions. It seems now that they are actually interested in making money in the markets. The last person I know joined Futex about a year ago. That was largely based on performance in a spread bet account. Interestingly he is a pretty low frequency trader and while there was some early pressure to trade more he is well supported now.

OK my last word on the subject then some practical observations of trading multiple time frames I do feel that FW is taking things out of context and feel that needs pointing out. The title of the paper including the abstract/byline is A Multifractal Walk down Wall Street The geometry that describes the shape of coastlines and the patterns of galaxies also elucidates how stock prices soar and plummet. by Benoit B. Mandelbrot All Mandelbrot is saying is you can better model a price series with multiple exponents or multiple fractal dimensions. He is trying to model the 'shocks' the 'black swans' hence the reference to soar and plummet in the abstract. From the paper : - "I claim that variations in financial prices can be accounted for by a model derived from my work in fractal geometry. Fractals—or their later elaboration, called multifractals—do not purport to predict the future with certainty. But they do create a more realistic picture of market risks." Seems that you are taking things out of context to support your argument that markets are not fractal. (if that is indeed your argument). If people look at Mandelbrot's work they can make up their own minds. Of course most people won't bother which is the chief reason that there is confusion about terms, people talk about things they have no knowledge of as if they do. Anyway FW, I guess we can respectfully agree to differ though I think the idea of adding price distributions is pretty interesting and has a lot of relevance and practical application for profile type approaches. OK on to the practical stuff

Arguably reducing things down to a 'pattern' has some advantages. Most people know from candlestick literature that it represents 'indecision' or a balance between buyers and sellers. Having accepted that, it makes things simpler in real time to simply look for the pattern in appropriate places. (like at a 20 ema or new high/lows....see I have been paying attention Brown ). One of the disadvantages is that there are other 'patterns' that illustrate balancing of supply and demand. Having said that they all share common characteristics but that's another story. DB puts forward a good case for focusing on the dynamics of supply and demand rather than the resultant patterns. Anyway none of that was the point I originally wanted to make assuming that you are pattern orientated a good pattern (imho) is a doji (or hammer) with very high volume. To go long you ideally want a long legged doji to go short it is less important.

I think people are getting confused about what a fractal actually is. You can iterate an equations with complex components (having a real part and an imaginary part) and some of the resultant sets have edges that are fractal. However at the time they where discovered the term fractal had not been coined. These are mathematical fractals. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandelbrot_set Mandlebrot noticed from other research on datasets from applied fields (rather than mathematics) that many (including financial data series) had the same characteristics of self similarity and 'fat tails' in their distributions. In 1975, Mandelbrot coined the term fractal to describe these structures, and published his ideas in Les objets fractals, forme, hasard et dimension (1975; an English translation Fractals: Form, Chance and Dimension was published in 1977). From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benoît_Mandelbrot (see 'later years'). It is worth clicking through to 'Lévy stable distributions' if you have an appetite for a bit of maths. Basically financial data series are fractal (by Mandlebrots definition) unless you disagree with his conclusions about the distribution of financial data series.

I am not sure...time will tell no doubt. I too like HLC you get to see the result of the struggle over the time period of the bar. Close (in reference to something else) is probably the most important price. If it is at the hard right edge that is the price. I do quite like candles to see price rejection...long wicks jump out at you, having said that you can see it with HLC. Mind you just reducing the number of bars you have on a chart or manipulating chart scaling changes perception. Visualisation is an interesting topic in its own right. I think candles do visually emphasise things but whether that adds clarity is down to individual perception.

Ahh tyvm acronyms ftw edit guess I should add tyvm - thank you very much ftw - for the win

Well he appears to have been writing. http://www.traderslaboratory.com/forums/f104/follow-the-smart-let-candles-and-5211.html Hakuna, It could be argued that that TG are irrelevant to trading with VSA principles. (if you are mischievous ) On the one hand TG have brought VSA into the limelight on the other they have tarnished it's credibility with all there 'colourful' marketing claims. Personally I am not thankful they operate at all as the damage far out weighs the benefits imo.

It projects what the volume would be at bar close based on how much as occurred so far.

Does it provide history or live only?

Hey Sheesh, is it easy to embed some sort of volume control or set the default higher? It was pretty quiet for me.

Would you mind explaining briefly what DIBS is? I don't recall it being mentioned here before.

Because there is no central exchange or reporting requirements, a guy on a banks FX desk can phone a pal on another desk and just do a deal for 10 yards. (A yard is slang for a billion units). As there is no volume information reported by either party quote providers take changes in bid/ask as a tick (unlike other markets where a tick is an actual transaction) but obviously this is only from the networks that they are actually connected to. So to be clear in spot FX you can get a tick when no trades have taken place, you can also have a huge trade go off that does not generate a tick. Having said that some people find it an adequate proxy. It is debatable as it could simply be that other factors (price action perhaps) are contributing more to there success more than they realise.

Or perhaps hes just trading!<gasp>!

You know if you plot every tick of the S&P on a 1"x1" scale and look at it from space it looks just like Norways coastline Your comment gave me my first smile of the day....thanks.

I like CandleWispers description (note description rather than definition). However you sample market data you find similar patterns of higher highs lower lows. You see congestions on a 5 minute chart that look quite similar to a congestion on a weekly chart. Another way of looking at things is does a yearly distributions of market data resemble monthly weekly or daily distributions? (to me they appear to). Mandlebrot (who I guess is the father of the fractal) posited that financial data (he researched cotton) follows a "Lévy skew alpha-stable distribution with α equal to 1.7". I understand that would make it self similar. Personally I think of markets as being 'fractal', not in any strict mathematical sense, but simply as you see similar phenomena regardless of how you sample the data (which is a way of saying on all time frames).

Sounds like a fun project. Hope that you enjoy it and it brings you stuff of value too.

I'd like to add my best wishes and thanks to all the people that make this such an exceptional community.

Am I right in thinking that you want to improve 'accuracy' (%winners)? Chances are you are going to have to negatively effect RR to make meaningful differences. I guess you want some kind of extra filter? Of course that will get rid of some good trades as well as more (hopefully) bad ones. Market internals or looking at correlated markets might help. More aggressively moving stops up or scratching trades might help % at the expense of overall profitability. I think Ninja allows you to test alternative money management strategies in simulation whilst running your normal strategy live?

You will be hard pressed to find a broker that offers MT4. It is the platform of choice amongst bookies and bucket shops. That's not to say it's impossible. The brokers that are usually recommended by people here (IB,AMP,Mirus,Transact,OEC etc.) should be able to offer you oil futures.

There are only really two options use a stop with no limit (or a wide limit on exchanges that don't natively support stop market) Then you risk slippage. Or use a stop with equal or tight limit and risk not being filled at all. Most people would prefer to be filled when there stops are hit unless perhaps stopping in to a position. There is no other way sadly. Knowing how your broker and the exchange handles various order types where they reside how they are elected etc. is pretty crucial imho.

FF3.0 was greatly improved (over 2) for me. Some sites I visit still just seem to be bloaters. I have to say I have been rather taken with chrome over the last few weeks mainly because it just feels a wee bit snappier.