PYenner

Sad but true. My older brother worked hard so he could retire early. Sold his house and bought a boat. House prices doubled over 2-3 years. Diesel prices went up and boat prices went down. Now he can't afford to buy back into a house. It was all covered in the news, all you had to do was be aware of what it meant for you, but he chose to live in comfortably numb land and ignore simple obvious realities. So he made a huge effort over many years to make money, then lost maybe three quarters of it over a few years from not caring to do some basic thinking that would have required no effort at all. The contradiction staggers me. Which is probably when they should be buying in. I am waiting to see if my brother does this too, his overseas share portfolio is the only other asset he has left and it will have taken a hammering. Apparently Chinas stability is now a significant part of the equation and it is still not a free economy, it depends on the political regime jumping in the right direction. A person has to have mixed feelings on that one. If I had significant money in the markets I think I would want to keep it liquid and able to move on short notice. One person's risk is another person's opportunity, perhaps. I have difficulty picturing a full blown meltdown. Money is no longer real, it is essentially valueless and governments seem able to invent as much capital as they please. Individuals do not want to be holding big debts at this time, yet counties are universally heavily in debt and have been for decades without consequences, yet. What markets and governments seem to fear is a drying up of confidence that leads to a drying up of liquidity, people hold onto cash to avoid risk. Markets and governments are essentially parasites that take the profit from other peoples turnover. If the turnover stops, their profit stops, jobs go. Given the size of modern government, the fear might not be job losses in the markets, but governments halving their employees. I have difficulty picturing how a modern economy would go into meltdown. Money does not have a rigid meaning anymore, at least for governments, it seems to be just numbers without any consequences. Yet clearly they have fear, I'm not sure how much though.

Good fortune Walter.

The BOE has also lowered interest rates and offered loans to housing lenders, so GBP and USD are both attempting to limit further slides. What is needed though is something to inspire longer term confidence and that is still lacking so we are still left with taking each day as it comes. Prior to the recent falls in GBP and USD, Pounds were "invested" in EURUSD and USD were "invested" in CAD. Those "investments" have recently been reversed or "cashed in", sorry I don't know a better way of describing it. It suggests that the major slides in GBP and USD are finished, but again it tells you nothing constructive about the future. I wonder if news gets deliberately leaked after the movements have already been factored into the markets. Three days ago it would have been nice to know that CAD was going to slide for three days but how much use is that information now? Recently JPY and EUR have been strong but only in relative terms, they lacked the weakness of GBP and USD, neither has actual strength imo. Unfortunately I have not had time to follow things properly but my impression is that there is no single currency that inspires confidence so I am inclined to keep my money in my pocket over Xmas/NewYear unless the market gives me a better reason than it has recently to think that the reward might be in proportion to the risk. Mostly all I see is risk on offer, without reward.

The insights and the analysis are good, necessary. Posting charts and a trading log is not realistic for me. I am trading it profitably and that is one priority. I run two other businesses and them and their customers are also priorities. The timing of the tidy up is a lesser priority for me because it has to be, I have prior obligations to many others particularly over the xmas silly season. Bruce

Agree and thanks for sorting out the issues including using a sensible stochastic loop. Its a pity it was not done in a consistent portable way from the start. It is only the human preference for whole numbers that restricts the resolution, the ema number is an unrestrictive double and is not confined to integer values. Portability is the benefit. Thank you Bruce

Unicorn MT4 does not have volume charts, so my thinking was that if emas are to be implemented properly with volume in MT4, then the ema step period has to be based on a 22 tick bar (say) not on a 1min bar interval. If that is not done, some of the benefit of a volume chart gets lost when you use MAs. Now I don't know if the internal MA functions in either AMI or NT are smart enough to do that, change to volume bars when used on a volume chart. I get the impression that NT might be doing that. It was just a cautionary thought that went thru my head. It may impact on the effectiveness of BOP in volume charts versus BOP on time charts, got the impression it was intended for volume charts. Thanks for the info, as you say ema should be better than sma. Bruce

Nicely said Walter, that is how I "feel" the final entry timing and quick stop out if it looks to be not developing normally, momentum discernmet...break or hold...

Unicorn I may be wrong but I think BOP was written for use on volume charts only, not for time charts. It may not be portable if ami does not have volume charts. Not sure sorry. Bruce

Have opened a Ninja account and an EFX account but have not taken on the learning curves with either. Significant programming efforts will probably get done in NT and only easy stuff done in MT4. I still use MT4 charts for trading and for my own currency based indicators which are what I have been working on for 9 months and am still working on because they are central to my trading but they are difficult to interpret still. Walters vma entry timing is now used for trading as well. I will still be using MT4 and doing basic programming jobs in MT4. I may start trading futures and I may switch to an ndd for forex but if either happens it will probably be next year. They were identical copies of vma6 with just ADX_Bars preset to the suffix value shown in the file name. Any one of those versions could be set to any value of ADX_Bars. We were experimenting with a fantail of vma lines at the time and that was the quick way to make up a bunch of lines to see what fast lines and slower lines had to offer. Walter used other values for ADX_bars in each of the versions he finally chose for trading, that was the intention from the beginning, keeping those options open without needing further programming at each step. The line colours could also be changed. That group of vma6_nBar lines used.. double WeightDM=ADX_Bars, WeightDI=ADX_Bars, WeightDX=ADX_Bars, ChandeEMA=ADX_Bars; So changing the ADX_Bars number also changed the smoothing. The fancy stuff like VI squared was commented out in the code. Yeah, there are too many threads and too many posts to find this stuff now. On the 1min chart 6bar was used (and set to 6) and 4bar (but set to 3). On the 5min chart 12bar was used (but set to 4 bars). The 5min trend line used 16bar (but set to 40 bars). It made sense at the time even if it seems nuts now. Test3 was the final test, it became adxvma6 (without the "testn"). I repeatedly got confused over the stochastic loop counting and live bars versus historical bars and it still needs to be sorted. The adxvma6 used... if (Out>Out[i+1]){HHV=Out;LLV=Out[i+1];} else {HHV=Out[i+1];LLV=Out;} for(j=1;j<ADX_Bars;j++) { if(Out[i+j+1]>HHV)HHV=Out[i+j+1]; if(Out[i+j+1]<LLV)LLV=Out[i+j+1]; } It was intended that the first comparison of two bars (one may be live) would be done before the loop and the loop would be used only for 3 bars or greater, but that isnt how it was working... Should have used... if (Out>Out[i+1]){HHV=Out;LLV=Out[i+1];} else {HHV=Out[i+1];LLV=Out;} for(j=1;j<ADX_Bars-1;j++) { if(Out[i+j+1]>HHV)HHV=Out[i+j+1]; if(Out[i+j+1]<LLV)LLV=Out[i+j+1]; } What difference does it make? When you ask for ADX_Bars=2, you get 2 ok. But when you ask for 3 you get 4 instead. And so on, ask for 4 get 5 etc. With the adxvma6_nbar series this will mean using different numbers for adx_bars and also for ema smoothing on other platforms and there may be a further complication with the smoothing weights needing to be different (may need to use numbers other than whole integer values). Fixing the bug made very little difference in the comparison I did but it was not a comprehensive comparison. The problems with matching ami version curves to mt4 version curves may arise if you used an internal ema function then my ema weights dont correspond exactly to the regular formula for weighting ema smoothing and slightly different numbers (eg 3.3 instead of 3.0) may be needed to match the curves. The hand coded version of the adx used in the mt4 version will also differ from an internal adx function in ami. The priority had always been to stay close to the VT adx version that Bemac used and that meant hand coding it across platforms. MT4 does not have a Wilders function and iMAon Array has "known issues" so the ema smoothing got hand coded as a result, the weighting formaula used may not be standard, again it made sense at the time. Frankenstein's workshop stuff.Drives ya nuts doesn't it? Cheers Bruce

Glad it was received ok.You aint no fool, just human like the rest of us. Each path brings both payoff and peril, big learning curve. Walters path promises payoff with minimum peril and I love that. Scalping came naturally to me, trend trading was a new opportunity that came to me later and the perils showed up in time. So I am comfortable with scalping, it fits my fingerprint as Soultrader calls it. If scalping is too fast for you, then maybe your fingerprint will be in longer trades. So don't shut up and don't stop trying. Do keep talking. This forum is a great sanity saver for traders. The entry drawdown thing has been called catching a falling knife. It does not have an easy answer that I know of. You are right to identify it as a major problem for longer trades. They also have an obviously high payout per trade. My losses came out of profit, they were not outright losses. So it can work but the drawdown or outright losses are very testing, high psycho impact and that is why I look for alternatives now, less stress. I did not find a good drawdown/stoploss rule for longer entries, things varied too much from week to week. So you asked a damn good question but the best I can say is it remains a toughy, didn't find a good answer to it yet. Tolerating drawdown was the only way I was able to trend trade gbpjpy, it did work overall but hell you can lose big too, the psycho stress was the killer, it was turning trading into a high stakes gamble and that was bad news. What you are attempting is possible, its just damn hard on your insides. GBPUSD or EURJPY are probably safer than GBPJPY. Sorry for the unconstructive nature of my 2 cents worth. I have not finished my first year of trading yet so I am still a noob too. Bruce

I have some hopes but also trying not to have hopes because it is nowhere near as good as real volume. Bid and ask is only available from live feed, that data isn't stored in history charts, so any volume info that can be built from it can also not be stored easily. Bit of a pest, experiment and see what comes out yeah?Cheers Bruce

Yes I need to tidy the mess up and as you say, get the charts displaying the parameters. There is also a small bug in adxvma6 which is what they all are, except for the original fantailVMA1_1. Thanks to another poster who pointed me towards a handy site I can now start tidying things up into a final version which may be called adxvma7 but it is a tidy up that should only really affect mt4 users, there is no great new stuff to be ported. As such it is on the back burner, it works so the need to tidy it up is not urgent.There might be a vma8 but for the moment I doubt if it will turn out to have anything significant to contribute, will have to try it to find out. Forex volume is one way I am going at the moment, while Walter goes into futures volume where it can be done to its best. I am also giving top priority to my trading income which has been on the backburner for too long now. Adxvma7 tidy up may be a month away, I expect to lose a few weeks to other business demands and then xmas gets busy anyway which halves the time for trading stuff. I might have to go AWOL for a while too, depends on what goes down next week, stuff is happening that might mean closing down one of the businesses 10 years earlier than planned <governments, don't ya love em sigh>. Bruce

Ditto, I have see GBPJPY come back to a human number like 235.00 like a fly on shit, can't keep away from it. So yes you see historic prices respected over and over. But those same human money movers who respect sr some days also have enough savvy to burn sr users often enough to keep them from getting rich. I have seen the market fly straight past a price it had previously clung to like a fly. I am a doubting thomas about every single establishment system, that is just me. I have also seen sr prices not get respected. Most of all the market seems downright devious to me, especially GBPJPY, as much as I love it I do so want to burn it back the same way it loves to burn me... Sunny the best advice I can give you from months of just that problem, drawdown on entry or pullback during a longer term trade, is... treat drawdown as you would a fully realized loss because it is every bit as bad. If your entry timing gives you drawdown then look for an entry setup that has you stopping out before drawdown builds. Ditto for pullback during a trade, it is nuts to watch unrealized profit evaporate, particularly when you realize that you might have closed or reversed and be making money out of the pull back instead of losing money. Current price is the irreversible reality, mightbe's are for suckers (and I'm trying to stop being one), sure it might come back (and it might not), but if you are building drawdown the reality is you are going backwards because your thinking tells you (wrongly, may I suggest) that it serves a good purpose (like what exactly?). I now classify tolerating drawdown as denial (dat famous river) and the creek it takes you up dont smell so sweet.Forgive what may seem like a tactless reply, but I am just finding my way back out from the path you seem to be starting down. Imo, stop out is better than getting that sick feeling as things go backwards. Watch it happen from outside the market where it gives you no pain. Wait for a good "Walter" entry with momentum behind it and you are back in without drawdown or much waiting. If the market is being a sod, sleep like a baby and come back the next day. >>Profitable or not, correct direction or not, it's hard to watch the market move against you as far as it can and still hold on if you're using real money<< Perfect description of what GBPJPY does to you, that is its speciality. Yes you can do long term trades and take the heat that goes with them. I used to do that but thanks to Walter I now wonder why I ever bothered. If I do get back to trend trading I hope it will be more like a series of scalps aimed at minimum drawdown (seriously small) and no tolerance for pullback, take it while you got it and don't let the market get any back. I once entered a long term trade a day early simply because the entry price came up. Next day the market bottomed just 5 pips below my entry price then went up for the next week (what a hero). If only I had scalped out there (what a sucker). For the next month it did ugly whipsaws (gbpjpy again) and I did eventually take a profit I could and should have taken much earlier. When it came time to re-enter for the second half of the pattern, boy did I get multiple burns. The price bottomed out, started up then pulled back 100 pips, ouch. Bottomed out started up, pullback 150 pips, ouch again. I lost count after 350 pips. From my own bitter experience, please heed some words... Do not get hardheaded about being able to call an entry price or direction, that has cost me so much money it is not funny, do the exercise, be aware of what it tells you, BUT DO NOT RELY ON IT OR EXPECT IT. The market is not that green or easy. Any such rigid expectations are a ball and chain on your brain and as much a liability as an asset. There are some very savvy money movers who seem to rely on making money from other peoples reliance on fixed thinking and sr prices are a classic example of something they know every bit as well as you. On the psychology front they are well ahead on that game and gbpjpy is the right place to find that out the hard way. Again forgive the lack of tact, but you gotta admit, its honest fwiw.. Regards Bruce

Walter Someone suggested the path I would take with it.. Drop the macd part, subtract 50 from the RSI signal to make it symmetrical about the zero line... It depends on how the Stochastic bit was done and I didn't look that closely. That might get rid of the long bias... But no-one seemed to act on the fix that had been suggested?? The only thought I had about repainting was when I saw a piece of code with two imaonarray()'s in the same loop, I had the impression each had to be in its own separate loop because thats the way the internal functions seem to use it, but as usual there is no documentation to explain the tricky doubts. I kept my mouth shut because guesses are all I have to go on and those guys know MT4 a lot better than I do. An alternatve would be to use (Stochastic(RSI-50) + Stochastic(Macd))/mom since the stochastic tends to normalize each signal..?? Cheers B

Sundowner Enjoyed the change of pace and subject. They have some good lively minds at tsd but I have avoided the temptation of working thru the threads, too many distracting thoughts. See they are looking at fisher transform, don't know if they also play with fft (fast fourier transform) but those transform things are powerful if only indicators had a more scientific basis. In electronics there are books written on the use of a single transform (there are many) and they are fundamentally useful for turning a complicated problem into a simple problem with a simple answer. What Walter is doing, using volume as one axis on a chart in place of the time axis, that is a dimensional transform, it gives a different view of the same setup, a cleaner view is a better view. The fisher transform can do a similar thing, but it needs to be approached in a systematic way and you need first to do transforms of each of the common tools like emas, design the indicator using those transformed versions, then do the reverse transform of the components to get back to the real world indicator design. I no longer have the brains or the time to into it but it tempts me, it nags at me like midas does with the volume transform thing. The more I look at it the less likely it seems that forex volume will properly support the midas thing, but I still feel forex volume has something positive to offer, even if it isn't the thing we most want. Sorry for rambling on. Cheers PY

Sundowner Thesis is an interesting thread and my impression is that the critical observations have obvious truth to them, macd and rsi do not have a compatible basis in their forex forms for combining as Thesis did. This is likely to be a translation defect not a defect in the original thesis. Also agree that the ranges of the two are incompatible and may only be compatible when used on a pair where they happen to be almost compatible. So the bias favouring long does not surprise me. These problems are probably fixable. What also worries me is the dogs breakfast in the formula (Stochastic*(MACD+RSI)/Momentum). If this really was an MBA thesis then the maths behind that should be sound... but from memory (only) Macd may be one of those "big swingers" that makes no attempt to calibrate itself to the pair in use, ADX also makes this most basic mistake, no attempt made to ensure they work in one pip units on any pair. So along the lines that others have said, before macd and rsi can be combined, they must both calibrate themselves to 1 pip steps on any pair (non standard versions of both may be needed), they both have to be in forms that swing about a zero line (non-standard for at least one of them) and they have to have compatible swing ranges.... otherwise it is all total cr*p and a waste of time. The short way of saying the same thing in my own way of saying it... all four variables may need to be normalized to a +1 to -1 range before combining them is mathematically sound, so I expect MBA used them in a normalized form in his original version, mathematical types think in normalized terms, its an essential basic to their thinking, the alternative is just not an option. The formula looks less suspicious to me if it is rearranged as (MACD+RSI)*(Stochastic/Momentum) but everything then depends on the "periods" that are used particularly in Stochastic/Momentum which is the seriously interesting concept because it may be attempting to get an early warning signal out of an ordinary stochastic signal. Really need to hunt down an online version of the guys thesis which most likely does not exist online. Without that you are shooting in the dark. The observation that it works on 1hr charts but not on 1min charts bothers me, it may be because of the "big swing" problem that comes from the instruments not being calibrated to work in pip units. So there is not just one issue here but many, dogs breakfast, not a pretty sight. That Stoch/Momentum step is interesting and I would like to understand that part. But there are so many things that would need to be fixed first, its a big project, unfortunately the lack of a common systematic scientific approach to the design of "standard" instruments like adx macd and rsi turns it into a witches brew not sound chemistry. Thanks for the interesting thread but the instruments need to be redesigned on a common systematic basis before they have a chance of being used in the Plug'nPlay way being attempted. That is the first step to turning indicators into science but I won't be making that step, I must get on with more pressing things unfortunately. Regards Bruce

Have not got into s/r yet. One by Coders Guru http://www.xpworx.com/ZigZag_Channels.htm Still looking at the rest... My own approach is that bid and ask volumes can be monitored separately and can be added for average volume or compared for strength comparisons. Differences in bid and ask volumes come thru as margin spread, something which I see happening most often in EURJPY but also in GBPUSD and in both cases that spread comes thru magnified in GBPJPY. That aspect is one of my current interests as it may signal which way the price will break.

Exactly. Having 10 pairs to make sense of is hard, when you get your wires crossed it hurts. Like you, I seek the reasons but I am only half way there, need to reduce the complexity before the trader can use it without shooting himself in the foot too easily. Exactly, it was an experiment done without stop losses to mess up the picture. It could only be done with a large demo account. It is unrealistic for a small live account, that is why it is not good to post those records. Thank you for understanding.Bruce

Walter Should have said that it is your expansion entries that seem to deliver the clean consistent trading, just as you say. Sometimes pullback or icon entries are good too but when the pullback is messy I tend not to trust them for a clean entry, so maybe one trade in 4 is a pullback type entry that looks clean, most are early expansion type entries, depends on the strength of the day. Bruce

Cattus The results look better than they actually were, there was a lot of drawdown allowed in those trades which is how I avoided taking losses, but it is seriously stupid to allow big drawdown. So they are actually a bad example of how to trade. But I have wanted to post sometime for a long time that shows fx really can be traded, which many people doubt. So fx is for real and so is Walter a for real trader. Unfortunately the market still has hard lessons to teach about defects in your thinking and in your understanding, so I still take too many losses in the real world. Thats why I am here learning better entry timing and better thinking from Walter. Walter Thanks for your tolerance. My live trades are done in Australian time which is 13 hrs ahead of gmt and further ahead of est, so its too much work to present the trades as examples, plus I mix a more aggressive style with your safer style, discretionary. But it has been going like 4 trades for 20 pips on a modest day, up to 12 or 20 trades when the markets are moving like the good old days and thats when it gets to be fun, in sync with the moves... Your 5min/1min entry is a major asset that allows for clean fast low stress trading. I always assumed that later entry meant less profit but it is giving a far more consistent entry that also lets you stop out quick if it doesnt look to be developing as it should. Has me wondering why I ever wanted to trade any other way. Thank you. Bruce

Lucky last pix 13 and 14. This was a pattern where all the majors move up at once. The exception is USDCHF which is a inverted pair, it goes down when the rest go up. If you get access to the sensible pair CHFUSD it would be easier to use because it would go up when EURUSD goes up. Anyway thats the reason you may see me going short in USDCHF and long in everything else. Trading is about working, there are no shortcuts. Happy Hunting Bruce

Pix 10-12 getting there slowly...

Pix 7-9 ho hum...

Try again, must be bed time, can't even attch files now..

Pix 4-6, don't know how to attach 14 pix to one post, sorry.