steveh2009

I don't think there's any question that the win rate could be high. We all have eyes here. But the only way to know if what you have been showing for years on end now is completely bogus or of actual value as a trading system is for you to open up an account at Zulutrade or Collective2 and show everyone that you can walk the walk. It doesn't matter if you trade real money with these signals sent to the 3rd party or not. There are many who don't. Given that you're this kind-hearted individual who has merely been showing newer traders 1000's upon 1000's of successful signals for over 3 years now out of the graciousness of your own heart in order to "rob the banks", it would be the last step in everyone's education, doubters and believers alike that you and your favorite systems are the real deal. Besides, it would be far more profitable in the form of subscriptions and residuals than the donations and broker kickbacks you're getting now. No contest. [Moderator: given the claims of TRO for 3+ years now on the web, I would mark this post as a helpful suggestion, not harrassment of a vendor as laid out in the "Vendors, Vendors, Vendors" forum recently. I would make the same suggestion to ElectronicLocal as well. What better education could we all receive than having these great educators show us their true metal through a 3rd party auditor?]

A buy-stop or sell-stop order to get an initial position is no bed of roses either. You can just as easily get triggered into the market and then have price retreat from your position, stopping you out. The momentum was good enough to get you in but then it retreats. You don't have to pick one over the other though. You can create a buy bracket (long) or sell bracket (short) order where one order cancels the other. Basically, you're trapping price in a range with your long in a buy bracket getting triggered on either the buy limit or buy stop, whichever one happens first. The first and second pullbacks are your best opportunities. If you're trading a great futures contract like the CL, spend less of your time thinking about these things and more of your time thinking about how to add to your winners when you catch a strong trend.

Pat, Donna has 1000's of posts on elitetrader. She has a journal over there which details her green stage in learning. Just use their search facility. A few forum thugs roughed her up recently and she decided not to post frequently anymore. If I had to guess her winning pct profile, it would probably be: 30% winners, 10% losers and 60% scratched trades (b/e + 1 tick), give or take. I'm guessing...but I think I'm a pretty good guesser after reading 100's of 1 person's posts.

Highly successful traders don't go around posting winning systems on trading forums dominated by those trying to become profitable, especially systems which show alleged golden entries all over the place with no stats to back up that it's an actual winning system. The irony is that you're posting "cheese" to attract newbie traders into your own sort of trap. Don't "think like a rat". Think like the person who set up the experiment in the first place and then you'll know what you're really dealing with.

Also, a 20 ema on the 5 min chart is equivalent to a 34 ema (or 33, close enough) on a 3 min chart. I don't have any problem believing there's a lot of good entries. Enough pics have been posted on that. The obvious thing left to do is to calculate the tipping point for the MAE and the average target which gives you the best stats. Otherwise, I think we're in Woodies CCI land here where everyone who believes in it believes it's a winner IF just the right trade management were uncovered...but there are no winners in the long run on the brokerage statements. [Disclaimer: I wasted the first year of my futures trading education (8 yrs ago) looking into the Woodies CCI snake oil. I saw 1000's upon 1000's of good historical setups. But it is and always has been a losing system]

Just a tax note for those who pay U.S. taxes. If you trade futures on a foreign exchange, this disqualifies your tax return from being filed electronically. I have no idea why this rule is in place, but it is.

For charting with IB, you have 2 free excellent choices: Ninjatrader and MultiCharts DT. With MDT, you can trade directly on the chart or through their price ladder. With NT, you can only chart. Trading off of the chart is not free. IB real-time data is snapshot-based, not transaction-based. In simple terms, this means that you cannot use tick charts or volume charts. However, you will have no problems trading off of minute-based charts. You've got historical price retrieval capability. The smallest price bar you can receive is 5 seconds and real-time data updates about every 0.2 seconds. Another way of thinking about it is that when a bid, ask or last price changes then you will see that price change. What you don't see are all of the trades which occur on an instrument. IB is a one-stop shop for trading virtually any instrument in the world. Getting a real-time tick feed with good charting will set you back around $500 to $1300 a year. The ones yelling the loudest who think that paying between $2 to $5.50 a day to trade using tick or volume charts is expensive should probably ask this question: Name me a small business other than trading which can generate 6 and 7 figure annual incomes and can exist on less than $10 of overhead per business day? Really, you can't beat IB as a charting data provider if you use minute-based charts. If you want another good charting package which works with IB and has a fixed cost ( i.e., no monthly leasing), then Amibroker is an excellent choice.

Is this better? MA100 = MA(Close, 100); Ref0 = Ref(MA100, 0); Ref1 = Ref(MA100, -1); Plot(Close, "", colorBlack, styleCandle); Plot(MA100, "", IIf(Ref0 > Ref1, colorGreen, IIf(Ref0 < Ref1, colorRed, colorBlack)), styleLine | styleThick); ------ What you could also do is use 3 points to determine if the 100 ma trend is in a possible transition state. That is, the current point makes sure it's above the last 2 points for green and vice verse for red. (If you have a non-white chart background where yellow shows well, I'd use colorYellow instead of colorBlack for the transition color). ------ MA100 = MA(Close, 100); Ref0 = Ref(MA100, 0); Ref1 = Ref(MA100, -1); Ref2 = Ref(MA100, -2); Plot(Close, "", colorBlack, styleCandle); Plot(MA100, "", IIf(Ref0 > Ref1 AND Ref1 > Ref2, colorGreen, IIf(Ref0 < Ref1 AND Ref1 < Ref2, colorRed, colorBlack)), styleLine | styleThick); ---------------------- You should hang out on the Amibroker thread on Yahoo Groups. That's where the developer of Amibroker and all the experts are, not here at TL.

How's this? MA100 = MA(Close, 100); // SetBarFillColor(IIf(C > MA100, colorGreen, IIf(C < MA100, colorRed, colorBlack))); Plot(Close, "", colorBlack, styleCandle); Plot(MA100, "", IIf(C > MA100, colorGreen, IIf(C < MA100, colorRed, colorBlack)), styleLine | styleThick); You can uncomment that SetBarFillColor() function if you want the candles to be green or red based on whether the close is above or below the 100 ma. [oh, sorry, this is not what you want. I re-read your post just as I submitted this. You want to look at the relationship between sequential 100 ma values, not how it is relative to the close. I'll post that when I get a chance]

You may find that your survivability chances go up if you're willing to lose more often, lose very little on those losers and add to trades when you're winning. On a futures contract such as the CL, you can have one winner take back anywhere from 3 to 60 losers, given that 1 loser averages out to 10-12 ticks. Think...arithmetic losses...geometric gains. Let the market catch you holding your smallest position when you are at your most vulnerable part of the trade (i.e., initial position) and have you holding your larger positions as the market is showing you that increasing your position is the right thing to do. The caveats to this which make it ideal are to trade a volatile contract (e.g., Crude futures) and to never take worse than a break-even loss once you start leveraging up your trade.

If you want to go totally free, then you can use NT for charting and then you can auto trade, programming in C# with TradeLink. You can find out more about TradeLink at: tradelink-users | Google Groups It's been around for some time and gets a lot of updates, attention to user input on a regular basis by its creator. Amibroker is good to have for charting, archiving your data and it has the most powerful backtesting of the three. It would probably be the most tedious to setup for auto trading but the user community has put some decent scripts together to get you started. Personally, I find the array-based approach of AfL coding too hard to read once I've been away from the code for awhile. [Personally, I think you'll learn more by hand backtesting]

Kojak is right. eSignal is saying the whole idea is under "legal review". This really means...no, automated trading is not going to happen.

I have two main trading systems: 1. Automated entry, discretionary exit. 2. Discretionary first entry, automated add-ons, automated or discretionary exit. The first works great because my entry signal can be so fast in a real-time futures market (I trade the CL crude futures) that only a program can get me in before my brain can even recognize the fact when it appears on my intraday chart. The second works great because I add to my contract total in strong trends and a program will dynamically add at just the right time, relieving me of the tedium and stress in these volatile situations. Since I don't accept a loss past the first add-on point, it is far better for a program to quickly (and unemotionally) protect my break-even point. I automate the parts of my trading where speed is essential and I keep the parts of my trading discretionary where speed is not an advantage over my collected market experiences (intuition).

I promised Tom in a PM that I would send him some charts showing the 2 best price action trailing stop rules that I've seen on a 5 min chart. From my experience on the CL (crude futures), these are highly reliable. The 1st one, well, everyone knows about that one. On the CL, you'll find that it's better to wait for the close than a touch with rule #1. Rule #2 is my own idea. It has also served me well. You should NEVER close below the midway point of a large candle body in an uptrend (the body, not the complete height of the candle) if you're expecting a strong CL move to continue without further consolidation or pullback first. Now, I also took the opportunity in this attachment to show you how to make the big money in a strong trend on the CL contract. One is aggressive, and the other is not so aggressive (but, in the beginning, you will swear the non-aggressive approach is very aggressive). This contract does not fool around. It doesn't take prisoners when it gets moving well. If you are a newbie, I guarantee you that you will just sit there in astonishment, watching the price go up and up and up (or vice verse in a downtrend)...and cry over spilled milk that you didn't get a pullback to enjoy a trend entry and justify your decision by saying to your trading buds, "well, it was just too risky to jump in without a decent pullback". Nice try in justifying your paralysis, but you are wrong. Of course, in this pic, you're not going to always get those perfect buy-ins with buy-stop orders, You will tend to have a 1 or 2 tick slip or an actual 1 or 2 tick slip in your favor so it all averages out and makes no difference. You don't want to enter stop-limit orders. They can and will get jumped over and you're defeating the point of the whole plan. Look at Tom's charts and his feeling that range charts are ideal. Does he see a lot of non-overlapping bars as trends get moving or bars that overlap by only half or, after many non-overlapping bars, a consolidation that overlaps by his range bar distance? Of course he does! This is the nature of price action in strong trends. All I'm saying is that adding on either bar closings or specific tick spreads to ensure a good price average (which will keep you away from the current price action) is HOW you can "up-size your fries" with having no higher brain function than putting the spread of orders out there for the market to take in. This is posted to inspire you to realize that you make the big money by betting small when you don't know what's going to happen next and then grow your position rapidly as the market shows you that you're right to do so. It is posted to help you realize that any normal position you enter into the market can turn into one of these and then you will know what you can do to get the most out of your good fortune to be in one from near the very beginning. The CL is an exciting contract to trade. If you're coming from the U.S. Index futures, you're in for a treat. It is a strong contract and strong contracts can handle aggressive plans like this one in strong trends. [disclaimer: This post is a pay forward, like Tom's thread, and not a hijack attempt]

If you don't use tick or volume charts in your trading, then Interactive Brokers is going to be the cheapest, real-time data fee around (pretty much no charge for most U.S. based markets). Of course, it's snapshot data, not time-stamped, transactional data For minute-based charts and range bars, I'd say that's your most economical approach. And besides, your Ensign charting package supports them. For transactional data, Anyone else is going to wind up costing you $600-$1500 per year. This is total cost, regardless of how they slice or dice the charting / exchange data charges in "the package" they're charting. If you are using IB data already and you think that's the culprit, I would tend to doubt that.

This is 20 tick range chart of a great move on the Crude futures August contract last week. Did I get the long signals right according to the rules? Because a max possible of $300 on a $3000 move can't be right. The CL contract is probably the premiere day traders futures contract because it trends so well. A $200 stop loss (20 ticks) is plenty on this contract as well so I'm okay with the range bar setting here.