bakrob99

Don't ever trade (intraday or overnight) with a large enough position to trigger you broker's attention. If you hold something overnight, do so only when you have sufficient profit in it to cover the typical range and your analysis suggests, based on soem sort of statistical probability, that you can expect the overnight to be favourable. Also, consider - what is the day of the week. Friday - do you really want weekend risk. What is your position: Short or Long? Short is safer to carry overnight because terroist attacks don't cause markets to gap up. Do some backtesting and know your limits.

Welcome to the world of learning about yourself. Most traders have had to deal with this issue and ultimately for me, it boiled down to fully realizing and understanding that I would never achieve the success I very much wanted without the discipline to trade my plan according to its rules and not my emotions. You need to reflect long and hard on what is behind this behaviour.

I believe that what he means by this is that the Magenta shows the TPO count or the That Price Occurred which means the amount of time the market spent in this price zone. Normally based on a 30 minute period. The Cyan will reflect the volume at the price in all periods. Both are volume measurements. Why anyone would pay for this is beyond me. TradeStation (and most other platforms) have the volume distribution contained in their DOM and that uses much feweer resources than trying to update this. Notice that there is no axis to reference how much volume is in either the magenta or cyan bars.

duplicated by error.

not sure why you say Price is Purple... The Purple lines must be either Volume at Time or Volume from another timeframe. Price is clearly shown on the Right Axis. Could you post a link to the source of this image please. Thanks bakrob99

I am sorry ... I thought it was obvious. When you see a big fat red candle like the one to the left in your chart, don't take the break until price gets through at least the majority or all of that red candle. It is controlling the price action.

If you look at the large down candle to the left of your consolidation pattern... to me it suggests a rejection of higher prices as the selling was strong. Here's the tough part to realize: For the traders who shorted the top of that bar... they profited from the down move and when price gets back there they are going to do it again. I know that sounds simplistic but in my experience it is the simple logic that works. If it were the 3rd time - it would be more likely to be able to breakthrough ... but the 2nd is still most likely going to be faded. In my experience... the best way to tarde breakouts is to pick a direction and be a (in this csase) buyer at the lowest price possible near the low channel and that allows you to scale at the breakout and then hold the rest without losing money if it pullsback. In other word, the best way to be a breakout trader is to enter before it breaks out on a pullback. Oliver Velez has some webinars and educational recordings where he describe this technique. You can find them with a google search. Good luck with your trading.

Tams suggestion (to use EL Collections) will work but is slow and disk intensive. I would advise using Global Variables (GV)... They are quite easy to use and work in memory. Very fast. But no information is stored or saved so when you reboot it wont be available to plot.

The best way to speed up Firefox is to go to Google Chrome.

The real question is what is the definition of a winner. 1 Tick gain? 10 Tick Gain? 50 Ticks Gain? It's different for each trader and setup. A winner is only a winner when it hits the target the trader had in mind when he/she calculated the Risk-Reward and placed the trade.

The site I used to check is at: Day Trading Forum - Value Areas and Point of Control 2009 Q4 By the way - you're right. When I replace the symbol with the RTH (ESZ09.D), the VAH and VAL checked to be quite close to the other site's value. Sorry for the "false alarm".

The VAH and VAL calculated by this indicator do not correspond to any of the MP sites that calculate them. I think the inclusion of overnight session data in the calculations may result in differences.

Strangely, when TS implemented the Range Bar it called it MOMENTUM. Range is something else again. Why don;t you just us the TS feed and use their Momentum bar if that is what you want? (I must be missing something here)

One thing I distinctly remember was how EVERYBODY who had any stocks or mutual funds were desperately trying to get their broker on the phone. Ha ... good luck. No one was answering that day. Some guys who traded futures got killed when they went long after it looked like a bottom was put in ... just to get nailed on the final push down. What a huge buying opportunity it turned out to be ... but only at the close ... or any day after. Stay safe. I will trade my system and use my stops regardless of what I think is happening.

duplicated, remove this post pls

1987 Oct 19th ... Market lost 23% in a single day. This Monday marks the anniversary with somewhat similar characteristics. Just about everybody has finally turned Bullish ... What would it take to really tank this market for a severe correction to shake out the weaker longs before a runup into the end of the year. Stay tuned... Monday should be fun. Comments?

Sure. My strategy is pretty simple. I wait for the market to show some strength or weakness. Then I get in sync with that trend. I also look for the trend to change at points of expected support and resistance. (Yesterdays high or low, Overnight high or low, Prior Day's Close, Today's Open, 30Minute Range High or Low. These are areas that the market wants to test, and when a bounce occurs it will often go to the other extreme. I enter into trends by waiting for pullbacks (for longs) to the midpoint of a Breakout Bar on any one of a 5, 10 or 20minute chart. I watch a 20K Volume Chart on the ES, 3K on the NQ. Look for consolidation, and then a wide range bar that breaks out of that. Sometimes I will add 2 bars together to form the breakout bar. If you want to reduce the number of trade signals in a day, then switch to higher timeframe charts. Using my method to trade on a 5 minute would produce about 10-12 signals, on a 10 minute about half that and on a 20 minute around 3 per day. I have included a chart of last week Thursday Oct 8 where I show 3 areas of consolidation and subsequent breakout of that area. When price returns (near to ) the area the Trapped Traders who are on the wrong side of the market are looking to get out of their position as close to break even as possible. It is their closing out of their trades that support this entry technique. I have watched virtually every tick of the ES for the past 3 years and I now find it somewhat subconsious to see these occurances and know which ones to take, and more importantly which ones to avoid. I use manual trendlines to keep me on the right side of the trend, which are shown drawn the way I choose to draw them in the dashed grey lines on the chart. Don't even think about shorting an uptrend until you see a double top form and then price trade below it. This pattern occurred around the 11:30 to 13:00 time on the chart shown. I use my Fib drawing tool to show me the 50% retracement point where I want to be a buyer, often 1 tick in front of it. Sometimes I will enter at market if price touches my limit order but doesn't fill me in a few seconds. I place my stop 1 tick below the low of the breakout bar or its combination. I look to exit at the 127% extension for 1/2 of the position and try to hold the rest until the 161% extension. If its a strong move, I will reenter on pullbacks which could have been done at 11:10 on this day as well as 14:00. I will trail my stop only after the market moves at least 4 ticks on the ES n my favour. I will move my stop to 1 tick below the maximum adverse excursion which has occurred on that trade. Usually this is 2 -4 ticks. This reduces my risk and leaves my profit target in place. I won't move the stop again until my 1st profit target has been hit at which point the exit on the 2nd half is discretionary. Do you have any questions?

I believe that it applies to all Stock Index futures but not commodities (Metals, Energy) I am not sure about Futures like Currency futures on the CME. I will have to do some more homework on these.

UrmaBlume, How has the change in Tick Reporting by the CME affected your Indicators? Bakrob99

Any stop should be outside the current market's noise. This level can be determined using the Average True Range of the past N-bars. I am looking at an ATR on my fastest ES chart right now that is at 1.7 points which is 7 ticks. That should be about the minimum for me. For an account size of say, $25,000 with a 7 tick stop risking 1% per trade you could trade with a maximum of 3 contracts. Typically, I consider a minimum stop to be about 6 ticks for the ES futures contract which is tight. Any tighter and you can easily be stopped out on a trade only to ave it continue in your planned direction. I sometimes use a slightly larger stop and if I have to absorb 6 or more ticks of heat, then I will exit on a retracement back or near to my entry point and scratch the trade.

I set up a Chart with 10,000 tick bars and compared the last several weeks with the 2 days this week. There is no doubt that these changes are significant. You can see about twice the number of bars for the day, compared to the prior days.

I received an email yesterday which alerted me to the fact that the CME has changed the way they report transactions. I am told that previoulsy, some transaction were lumped together when reported resulting in tick bar values which were inaccurate. They have now corrected this. The point of the email was: If you use tick charts to trade e-mini S&Ps, you may have noticed an increase in the speed with which your charting software produces tick bars on Monday and today from the speed that it produced the same size tick bars on Friday. As of Sunday, October 4th, the CME Group enhanced the reporting of trades to provide more information at greater speed. The effect of this upgrade is to produce more ticks over the same price action than were produced before. You can get more information at http://www.cmegroup.com/globex/files/EquityFuturesEnhancements.pdf

Well, you got that right.

By the way, you can find out the method behind Jesse Livermore's Pivot Point theories in the appendix of his book "How I Trade Stocks". I rented it from the library and enjoyed reading it. Quite fascinating how he went to great extremes to keep other people from influencing him with his trade decisions. He located his office away from Wall Street and hired some big bodyguards to keep everyone out of his office.

Even if you do get it right ... with more than 50% winning %, how in the world will you make anything after commissions??? ... not too mention the odd fast move against you for some slippage to make up for. Scalping the market for retail traders is the path to ruin ... It's not a road cause it takes longer to get to ruin than the road implies ... it's just slower and more painful like a death of 1000 cuts.... slowly bleeding your account to its ultimate margin call. I spent several years when I first got into this business thinking I would outsmart the market. Now I make money by just following a not-so-clever system which follows trends and has a 66% winning percentage with a Risk Reward ratio slightly better than 1:1. Usually I take 3 -5 trades per day. That's it. It's also a way of trading that works for me. It took me a while to realize that I am not a breakout trader. I wait for a market to move and buy on the inevitable pullback. Not too tough to figure out. Just follow your system's money management and as the account balance increases, increase the contracts in the trade. Reduce size when things aren't going too well. Don't waste time trying to out think the market. That's my best advice to you.