PYenner

Yes there is going to be uncertainty at a time that is not good for the markets globally. Modern Japanese polititians face some impossible challenges. One of them is how to go down in the history books as something other than a failure. After WW2 Japan adopted a "25 year plan" for industrialization. It was the greatest economic success of the last century. In cars and in electronics Japan showed the rest of the world how to do it better. It was a unique plan, a partnership between government and industry to work together with a business plan. Every other country staggered along with no plan and got what it deserved, just as Japan got what it deserved. Japanese polititians and industry leaders stand in the shadows of visionary giants, in comparison they must see themselves as lacking. But it could be worse, try being a polititian in Russia. Do you see something like a 25 year plan in action there, or something more like a road to nowhere? For better or worse, Japan also showed the rest of the world how to follow its example. China and India now work towards industrialization but in bringing themselves out of the third world, they risk bringing the first world downwards for the first time in history. This generation of Americans is the first to have a lower standard of living than their parents. Japan and the rest of the developed world face that future too. If you go back further in history, the rise of the Greek then Roman cultures was followed by a collapse into the Dark Ages and then came the renaissance from which the modern world regrew. Has the first world reached its peak and from here on, is there a slide until some culture comes up with an answer, a new 25 year plan? I see no great vision on the horizon. Where are the likes of the great American leaders now? Why does the world face decay for lack of a vision? Why have we had 30 years of braindead clueless polititians? Are we about to get what we deserve, the reward for being a TV junkie couch potato, brain dead and going nowhere, a B grade movie for a future? Or maybe I should have just said yes, the markets seem to be waiting to see which way to jump next. We live in interesting times.

Soultrader Thanks for that. The main thing I hope to see come out of Walter's Forex/Icon/VMA thread is some overdue good press for Forex trading. It is a tough market to get into but it can offer rewards in proportion. Maybe we will see it demonstrated this time and people will see that it really can be done.

Change gears again If you can put the 5min base line onto a 1 min chart. Maybe you no longer need the 5min chart. You can do it all off a 1min chart or perhaps have two 1min charts, one zoomed on for entry/exit and the other zoomed out for the longer perspective. I suppose that will need another pix, but it is kinda all there in the pictures above, if you delve into it?

Change gears again. Currently the black line on a 1 min chart gives an entry signal when it starts to curve into a new trend. It is possible to add in a slightly faster line and use that as an early warning of an emerging trend. Again it is a recycled pix, not the best for the job but maybe enough to see the direction....

One possible advantage of using VMA lines for a fantail. The slowest line sometimes (recovery) gives an estimate of what your exit price might be. In this case magenta is the slowest line and since it gives the longest flat line during a recovery, then you have a nice fixed estimate of where your trade might end up going. Recycled another pix. Try to see the general idea, when the fantail diverges, all the lines will eventually converge again. In the case of a recovery, the faster lines "chase after" the slowest line, so that is where they will likely meet. Magenta is sometimes a guide to exit price.

Ok you got it right but you are also a step ahead. Will do the first step here then come back to the second step. They do overlap yes... The first question is only about how close you want the black line on your VMA indicator to be to a trending price. I tried to show you how it can be so close it gets really mixed in with the price and so far away that it is real smooth. The close one shows detail, but is that what you want to see? Or is it better to have a smoother line that shows trend, but ignores the detail? I don't know which is best yet. I am saying you can chose to have your black base line following either a detailed path like yellow, or a smoother "trendy" path like either blue or magenta. It is something that can be chosen, so think about which ONE of the THREE lines would be best as your black line when there is a trend. It wasn't the best picture. I have seen sometimes when comparing VT to Igorad that sometimes one had a smoother line up between ladder steps, while the other had more wiggles in it, like mini steps on the way up. So do you want mini steps or smooth? I don't have an opinion yet.... would like to hear others. --------------------------- OK, now the second part IS about having multiple VMA lines on a 1 min chart. But that needs to be discussed on its own and it has more to do with the flat bit and the shoulders going into or out of the flat bit. I did post a picture on the other thread that introduced that line of thinking. I want to take it a lot further because it has possibilities. One possiblity is that, in addition to your black line which is flat, you can also have a few more lines, maybe one that works a bit faster so it doesn't stay so flat but it may give you an early warning before your black base line turns up or down into a new trend. That may not be keeping it simple, but it might still be handy. --------------- A third possibilty is replacing the fantail we have now with a fantail of VMA lines. Now there is one scenario where this might give you an exit price guide when trading a recovery. Its too many things to think about, they need to be split up and developed. I suspect a VMA fantail may be more useful than the fantail we have now. Scalping the swings either side of the flat line may also come into it. Dude, it gets all mixed up, overload, meltdown, kablooowweee :helloooo: One at a time, keep it simple, argh, I should be so lucky :crap: Pass me a banana someone please...

Numbering- yes, its chaos city here, you probably noticed :helloooo: Responsiveness- yes, I'm surprised you noticed that. Good eyes Walter. You see Igorad kinda cheated a bit on one stage maybe. But what he got may have been better that what Bemac was using. So maybe Igorad went with what worked best instead of copying Bemac 100%. Or maybe he ran into the same problem I had, MT4's ema function crashes indicators, I wasted 2 days on that #@$* incompetence arggggh. Anyway, yes we have some options here, ways to optimize the shoulder at the exit from the flat bit into the trending bit and how closely it sticks to a trending price. It needs more time to explore it.... Glad you see the importance of it.

Trend following. This is a slightly different topic from the others. There are some options to control how closely the VMA base line sticks to the trending prices. Close in with the price gives maximum detail in the base line, is that detail wanted or a nuisance? A slight gap between the VMA line and the price line occurs when you slow down the VMA by using more bars in the minimum sample size. This gives a smoother line when trending, easier on the eye but also means the Base line lags behind the price more, Good news or bad news? Which trend following performance works best for trading? Yellow (fastest), Blue (bit slower) or magenta (too slow)?

Recycled one of Walters pix. Undershoot, overshoot, what they look like, how to tune for optimum shoulder.

Some ramblings as I try to make sense of a new toy. Walter found a VMA indicator made by Bemac for the VT platform and had the sense and experience to see that it offered something special. Walter likes to keep trading simple (otherwise you go nuts!) and the flat lines from Bemac's indicator give a very clear reference mark on a chart for beginning and ending trades and for thinking about your options. But what makes the indicator line go flat? What makes it switch from following a trend to going flat and then back to trending again? What needs to be improved in the way it- 1. follows trends? 2. changes from trend to flat? 3. changes from flat to trending? 4. does it have more uses still? I think of it as an ADX_VMA because it comes in two parts. The first part of the code is an ADX and some of the advantages come from the way an ADX works. It automatically adjusts itself to any range of sawtooth and ignores it. Instead, it aims at seeking out any trend component hidden in all sorts of choppy rubbish. This is what makes the flat area or horizonal effect possible. When the price goes into a choppy sawtooth the ADX main signal goes low, 0-40% is low. The VMA indicator switches from following the trend to flat line. When a small trend is present the flat region may step up or down a few pips to show that a small trend is happening inside the sawtooth. Once the trend component is big enough compared to the sawtooth component, the ADX gives a bigger signal, 40% up to 70% on a clean trend with little fallback. This lets the indicator switch to trend following. There are adjustments that can be made to how closely it follows a trend and to how cleanly it switches from trend to flat and back again. What you don't get and maybe don't need is an adjustment for the range of sawtooth movement it should ignore, that part happens automatically inside the ADX and it makes things easy. Nice stuff and it is the ADX that does it. But if you ever tried to trade off an ADX signal you probably went nuts and gave up, too tough. Thats where the VMA part comes in and gives a flat line when the ADX signal is below 40%. VMA means Veriable Mean Average but what it does is simple. When the ADX signal is low, it uses a long slow average, many bars or "periods". When the ADX signal is high, it uses a short fast average, as few as two bars effectively. Think of the fantail, the magenta line is the slowest to curve, it has the longest slowest curve, maybe 100 bars in that average, old news. The Yellow side of the fantail is fastest, bends quickest, follows the trend closest, maybe 2 or 4 bars in that average, recent news only. The VMA part decides how many bars to include in its calculation of an average price, many bars give an older price, fewer bars give a recent price. It can stick with the past or stick with the present or somewhere in between, variable. Trend following uses the prices from just the last few bars and ignores the past. Flat line uses the past prices and ignores the present until it has something to say thats worth hearing. --------------- Walter has experience at trading with the indicator and historical charts only tell you part of the story about what you need from an indicator in order to trade easily with it. So I will rely on his comments and introduce concepts for tuning ADX_VMA performance by using fewer or more "periods" or "bars" or "counts" in a sample or average. Fast means small numbers, slow means big numbers. If the ADX samples too few bars, maybe 4 or less, you get overshoot, it follows the trend after it should have gone flat. If the ADX uses too many bars, you get undershoot, a slow curve into or out of the flat zone, it should have gone flat quicker than that. Optimum is somewhere in between. Time to find a picture.

FantailVMA1 is more like Igorad2+, it is a bit closer to Bemac's flat areas. I want to do another change to get it closer still in the way it follows a trend.

Agree, it belongs on another thread. It will take time figure things out with VMA. This thread needs to progress without being delayed by VMA issues.

Similar thing but using Igorad2 which is better.

The Japanese carry trade is chasing around for the best place to put their money. AUS, NZD, GBP, bouncing from one to the other looking for the least scary place to park their yens where they will earn more than the 0.5% rate in Japan. Bad news on one side of the globe has yen going to the other side of the globe. Bloomberg has finance posts that are worth looking at.

OK Walter Here is a picture of a period rainbow. A scalping guide maybe?

Yes I need to post charts but maybe some words will do for now. ADX_VMA_Eval_1Min.mq4 was done to look at what difference it makes to sample different amounts of time. Bemac and Igorand used 16 periods. On a 1Min chart that is a 16 minute view of the past. On a 5Min chart that is an 80 minute view of the past, 16x5. The 80 min view gives a longer flat area, 16 minute view gives a shorter flat area. There are multiple possibilities- Bemac will have fiddled with different periods and settled on 16 as the best general purpose number for all charts but if we can find more variables to fiddle with then we might improve on Bemac. The 1 Min chart in particular might benefit from having slightly different periods. If you set the sampling on a 1min chart to 80 periods or 80 min it will show a very smoothed out base line. If you zoom out that chart and compare it to a zoomed in 5min chart so they show the same amount of time, there will be similarities in the base lines. So, you could have a 1min chart showing a normal 1min base line, another line showing a 2 min curve, another 3 min etc, each flatter and slower to bend than the one before. All on the 1 min chart. There are possiblities for zany ideas. Inspiration. Most turn into junk but thats just life. Sometimes there is a payoff for thinking outside the square. If you can handle all the extra confusion that is....

Yes the new tpl was calling the old Igorad2 file, sorry. The second attempt should be calling the right file. So many modified files here its not funny... In your chart the red line is the base line from FantailVMA1 and you can see the % difference in range of red and black (Igorad2). It looks very close to Bemac on VT now (unless I stuffed that up too @#$&!).

Sorry After checking it I stuffed something up. Try this version, same filename. Kill the earlier version. FantailVMA1_tpl.txt

Sorry I sent a bad tpl. Checked it first of course. But must have overwritten the file somehow. Seems I need to double check....:crap:

Hi markd85 I sent the wrong tpl file. I checked it first but then seem to have overwritten it somehow... Will send the right one.

For anyone fiddling with ADX_VMA_Eval_1Min.mq4 on 1 min charts. ADX_Periods=16 VMA_Sample_Bars=8 Those give normal type results. If you double both numbers it is a bit like having the 2 Min VMA indicator showing on a 1 min chart, longer flat areas. Ditto, 5 times is a bit like the 5 min flat areas showing on a 1 min chart. Might help to have that idea to guide towards... whatever might help for scalping off 1 min charts.

Here are the MT4 files. VarMAv1.1 has had a small change, uses one less array. The fantail template got the MA26 line (VT) line changed to DarkGreen and thicker. Should look like Walters fantail and behave like Bemacs VT version. Sorry about the delay, new to this template stuff. :doh: Rename FantailVMA1_mq4.txt to FantailVMA1.mq4 Rename FantailVMA1_tpl.txt to FantailVMA1.tpl FantailVMA1_mq4.txt FantailVMA1_tpl.txt

Had some confusion trying to start up VarMA indicator with Fantail template. Had not used templates before and when I added VarMA indicator to a chart all I got was the base line and no fantail, the template file wasn't loaded. Seems to be an intentional option on MT4. If you want just the base line, add the indicator VarMA. But if you want to have the fantail, don't add the indicator, instead either select the chart then use the charts tab then template to add Fantail template to the chart or right click on the chart then Template then Fantail. Makes sense once you get used to it but you can waste some time figuring it out the first time.

I could but it would also need to have a new tpl file for the fantail and I don't know which version people want. 1. Igorads version 2. Walters version with some line colors charged 3. Foreground reversed fantail, Yellow in front, Magenta behind. 4. Foreground reversed but with Walters changes? 5. ???

Walter Good news. A quick fix for VarMA_v1.mq4. Find these lines at the end of the code. VMA[shift] = (1 - Const) * VMA[shift+1] + Const *Close[shift]; VarMA[shift] = (VMA[shift] + VMA[shift+1])/2; } for( shift=limit; shift>=0; shift--) MA[shift] = iMAOnArray(VarMA,0,MA_Length,0,MA_Mode,shift); //---- return(0); } Comment out the top two lines and add one more line like this... VarMA[shift]=((2-Const)*VarMA[shift+1]+Const*Close[shift])/2; //VMA[shift] = (1 - Const) * VMA[shift+1] + Const *Close[shift]; //VarMA[shift] = (VMA[shift] + VMA[shift+1])/2; } for( shift=limit; shift>=0; shift--) MA[shift] = iMAOnArray(VarMA,0,MA_Length,0,MA_Mode,shift); //---- return(0); } The result should be almost identical to VT. The equation is unchanged, it just uses one less array and less number crunching, but it is enough to make 5 pips difference on a 100 pip movement. Hard to believe that double precision math inaccuracies made so much difference.