sr100m

for long trades (shorts are opposite) if close of most recent bar is in 50-76.4% retrace of most recent swing (use zig zag to define swing) and close of this bar bar is above open (for long - below open for short) and the reward to risk ratio is more than a 3:1 (see below) then place stop market order 1 tick above the most recently closed bar (for long - 1 t below for short) and place stop loss 1 tick below the low of the lowest bar of the retrace when price hits 161.8 extension take profit OR trail on low of bars OR use atr trail or whatever for reward:risk ratio calculation - distance between initial stop loss and entry is risk distance between entry and 161.8 ext is reward. it's based on EW (trying to catch wave 3). In theory win ratio is 30-40% which with a 3:1 av W: av L gives a positive expectancy. like much intraday trading it is tricky to trade as a lot of decisions have to made fast and you will get slipped - especially on the trades that are going to work out. i'm trying to automate it. can use 61.8 instead of 76.4 if you want in the retrace - just be consistent.

I moved on to other things - still trying to piece together something that works for me consistently. but for the things I was trying both xlq and quotelink did the job well.

both offer (or at least offered) a decent free trial. both have templates for the kind of thing you want to do from where you can copy the excel functions you want - if i remember i may have had to search around or even ask one of them to get the template so if you can't find it contact them. Both provide good support. xlq works out less expensive but you pay one year upfront (i think you need the pro version of quotelink). xlq seems to only let you have one timeframe (i.e. 5 mins or 60 mins but not both at the same time and may not offer timeframe less than 5 mins for interactive brokers - i can't remember exactly). quote link is more flexible in this respect. this is really the only major difference I found between them. you need to be comfortable using excel functions. both have a learning curve putting the excel functions you require together, but I got the hang of it pretty quick and the templates help. one, i can't remember which - xlq i think, had a problem with interactive brokers which meant the current close price was not showing the correct value but with a little help from the programmer it got sorted. i also think I had some similar kind of problem with quotelink and again it was sorted by the programmer. I don't use either any more but when I did I found both good. the best thing is to download a trial of both (ask if you can't get the historical ohlc you want in the trial or just pay one month 20 or 30 bucks) and see which you like best. you will need a datafeed (iqfeed or interactive brokers - they may also offer other datafeeds).

QuoteLink XLQ don't bother reading the rest of this post - it is just some pointless words 'cos apparently my message without these words is too short to allow me to post it. there. that should be enough waffle to do it.

I too have read many of the above. For me, Mark Douglas and Brett Steenbarger did not do much. Van Tharp persuaded me to take the psych thing seriously but again did not help much beyond that. Many swear by these writers. I found them interesting but not much more. For me, ari kiew, like a previous poster, was a gamechanger. He came from a background of psychiatry dealing with suicide (I think), then did a lot of work with Olympic athletes and then applied what he knew to SAC hedge fund traders. The first time I read his stuff it did not do much. When I cam back to it at a later date i could not get enough of it. Summary - set a goal, identify what needs to be done to achieve it, do it and then control the anxiety, euphoria, fear etc that will inevitably arise. I think different stuff works at different stages of your progress. Read it all, keep it on your shelf and keep going back to it. And if you are one of those who wonders why all us neurotic whackjobs need the psych work - lucky you.

google "quotelink" and "xlq"

This strategy is from p263 of my edition of Marcel Links High Probability Trading. The concept appeals to me (vary the exit strategy depending on market conditions) and would like to test it in TS8 but I am coming up against my current very limited easylanguage skills. It is, I think, in 2000i easylanguage (I asked someone who has 2000i to look at it but they could not get it to work in 2000i either so there seem to be errors in the published code). I've attached a zip with the original and one with my changes based on trying to verify the code in TS8. The changes I have made are - change all instances of buy("LongExit") to buy, sell("shortentry") to sell short etc. - change the 'On Close' to 'next bar at open' in the entry signal section i then came up against 'From Entry("Buy1")' in the {stops} section where I got an error 'market stop and limit orders must specify next bar'. This combined wit the 'at$', which may or may not be a typo has left unsure what to do next. I would be grateful if anyone could help me advance my EL skills by pointing out how to make this work. marcellink.zip

Assuming you have long and short positions in different instruments - one way to think about it is - assume all your positions (both long and short) could go against you at the same time (unlikely but not beyond the realms of possibility - if someone had told you 3 years ago that Lehman and AIG would go bankrupt within weeks of each other ...... ) - how would you determine things then. I am more comfortable with the portfolio heat type approach. You need to have a system with an initial stop loss to do this (although you can substitute your average historical loss or use atr to calculate volatility stop losses). The difference between your entry and the stop loss along with the size of your position allows you to estimate what percent of your equity you would loose if stopped out for each position you have. The total percent at risk among all instruments is the portfolio heat. 20% is a figure you see banded around as a max heat although depending on the performance of the system it may need to be a lot lower. If you adopt this approach it does not matter whether a position is long or short - all you are concerned about is how much you could loose if it goes against you. Van Tharp is the best I have come across on the topic of position sizing (Trade your way to financial freedom book). I have no affiliation with his company - just a grateful reader. Just to muddy the waters a bit further Curtis Faith in his book about the turtles says that one of the turtle "rules" addressed this - basically the rules meant that turtles were allowed to offset long and short positions against each other to a certain extent (and effectively have a higher portfolio heat than if all positions were in the same direction).

I bought mtp a few months ago. What i did not realise at the time was that i was not just paying for a good piece of software and a good trading method (not perfect but then none is) but also for the comprehensive trading education - money management, psychological aspects of trading etc etc - that i badly needed - from interested and enthusiastic sellers who either genuinely trade themselves or else are very, very good actors. I have learned more from this group (including the more experienced members on their boards) than i learned from all the other trading stuff i have paid for put together. I am not there yet but i am getting there in large part thanks to biting the bullet and buying this. As always in these kind of postings, I could be working for the company. But you can get a fair amount of their background stuff free - part of their trading manual, the message board, online seminars which demonstrate the features of the software and give you a feel for the bona fides of the people running it. If you google it you can also find partner sites that sell it at a discount. Even still, parting with the money was not easy. For me, though, it was more than worth it.