PYenner

Will look into it.

Walter I am strongly suspicious of statistics for predicting the future. I have seen many times how support can become resistance but that does not mean that statistics had anything to do with it. It will lose my confidence completely once it gets much past 2SD's. Relying on 3 SDs to tell you anything reliable is unrealistic to anyone who understands SDs, but how many do? It does look to have big plusses, that justifies it. But I am fearful of encouraging misplaced trust in things that are not understood well enough by most people that they know when not to trust them.

Blu-Ray Thanks heaps. Walter The three platforms I run here use three different midnights, none is est. Even the two that are close to GMT differ by an hour. One seems to have different "midnights" for each pair, arghhh*#. This is the United Nations here... Date and time might be the best. People will have to work out their own time offsets somehow if they want to use a common "midnight" or any other "time". There is a hazard here with the way MT4 remembers your last settings, may have to find a way around it or... you go on holiday for a week, come back, start MT4 and it takes 2 hours to start because it is running 200 SDs per bar on a weeks worth of bars on every chart you left vmar running on, bit of a time bomb especially on 1min charts, we will see. Yes Midas is calling me too. Vwap looks like the "time diluted" version of Midas. Excel may be needed for midas, got it but don't know how to use it yet. Some Chimp is keeping me busy... There is a possible problem with forex volume, the gap data, in between the bars. I do not know if the bar data includes the volume data from the gap. I only know the bar data does not include the price data from the gap ticks. I need to find the answer before I start using volume big time. MT4 does not have crash protection against division by zero, it locks the computer, you have to reboot then your default template is corrupt and it doesn't even know what charts or indis you were running, uses the next best template it can find, big mess. Gunna have to be extra thoughtful with this stuff. Taking a simple approach could have nasty consequences.

Walter Question time. I have only found eld vwap files and they are encripted so I cant read them. Need an idea about what user settings are needed especially for starting or restarting at what(?) location. eg Looks like jperl was using a 51 bar setting on 2min chart for volume distribution history so I assume vwap used the same setting, so if we use 1min chart, that means start on current bar and read previous 102 bars (2hrs) of data. Alternative is to have a user setting for "start x bars back from current bar" and sample "y bars of history". What controls do you need to get the thing to start/restart on a pivot point or time or price or back/forward x bars, what???

Homestudy These are a different breed of vwap, they are also a bit like an ema. How do you describe it?? Its more like an ema of the price, using a weighting factor derived from a volume average, but don't hold me to that, I'm grasping for words here. Walter Some good news, looks like MT4 has an internal function for doing SDs which will help fix the slowdown problem that the other platforms were having. Variance is just the square of the Standard Deviation so the two are like cousins, but with the platform crunching SDs internally, it will work much much faster than computing variance the slow way inside an indicator program.:o Midas is an amazing concept, getting rid of the time variable altogether and using volume in its place. When I can get my head around it, I think that will answer some difficult questions for me that are all about reading the market. Could be very powerful if understood and exploited properly, you have a good eye for this stuff.

Hi Unicorn You had to ask the complicated question... At the time the chimp oscillator project came up I had been working on an "efficiency" oscillator which shows how efficiently money is being used in the market if it is intended to produce price movement that is big enough to be traded. Another way of saying that is that it shows "smart money" spikes at the start of a ladder and it can also do the opposite during stages of an HE when you get a series of candles 3-5 pips long, but the price doesn't go anywhere useful, that produces a zero reading. At least that was the intention. Now I have not got any further with the efficiency oscillator. I made a version of the Chimp with the volume term included, my intention was to run a volume Chimp next to a regular Chimp and confirm that it was doing the expected job of accentuating the start of a ladder and helping towards giving a zero reading during HE. But you will only see the zero reading effect well if you use very little smoothing so that it shows something closer to momentum with less price mixed in. Aside from one effort to confirm that it was having something like the intended effect I have not had time to develop it further or study it further. It is currently on the back burner and likely to stay there for some time. I seriously don't want to get into opinions on smart money, it is not what Walters thread is about. Use of the volume term may be another reason why Chimp swings a bit differently and accentuates small HEs better, but again it really needs its own thread if and when it develops further because there are different ways of dealing with it. You are probably concerned that dividing momentum by volume looks like a drastic thing to do that will alter everything but it has a modest effect within the ADX. There are two stages where a division is used, diff/sum. These progressively normalize the signal to a zero to one range, but in the process they largely remove the intrusion from the volume term. It is not as drastic as it looks and it relies on the normalization to keep it from being drastic. Also in forex alone, volume has the same units as price, effectively pips. So where you see price or momentum divided by volume, it is similar to pips/pips and is to some extent like dividing one version of the price by another version of the price. There is plenty to be said but the time is not right and this is not the place but that may sound evasive, so I have tried to give some sort of an answer but it is nowhere near a full answer, needs more time... Cheers Bruce.

Thanks for that Walter. Well it looks like we already got some vwaps, so maybe a thread can start already. Umm I am afraid that MT4 will not be able to do so much heavy maths, it will miss ticks badly, I expect we will have no choice but to find another way to do vwaps that uses much less heavy maths.

Hi Homestudy I did plenty of searching and couldnt find any. It should make life easier for me anyway. Thank you lots. Bruce

Hi Agustín Gee, that is a nice setup and Fisher looks to be doing a good job. H.E. means Horizontal Effect, its about the way vma lines go horizontal. This thread is one of a number of threads that Walter has started recently, all dealing with vma lines and growing towards becoming a good trading system, so there may be other threads that you can read more about vma. Looks like a nice analysis to me Agustin. Happy trading Bruce

Walter More talk on vwap. I have seen times in forex when vwap could be useful on a really long time span, 1 week to 1 month or more, when the price tends to swing within a band. Our present needs are more like scalping. But if ema's of prices can be used then it helps in making for a system that might eventually expand into other time frames and other pairs that are more or less volatile, just like vma is tending to do now. Then you wouldn't have to be restarting the vwap indicators all the time. I have a funny feeling multiple bbs could already be used to get results something like vwap, just a bit clumsy at first. Umm I need to get some quality chart time as a priority for a while and be a bit single minded about that. So, not overnight delivery on vwap maybe. Cheers Bruce

Hi Agustín /cattus Walter may be enjoying some "lifestyle" so I will say something, but remember I am no master trader. At first this confused me because audusd should not be having 50 pip falls during an HE, then I see it is EURJPY and I see why you would want to trade some of this. I like using two similar instruments and seeing where one is better for some things and so on, or maybe you decide you need something better than both. Good process to make comparisons like this. Despite the 50 pip part which looks good, trading the M's is dangerous and most of this looks like dangerous HE stuff that gets me burnt. The place to be entering a trade looks to be an hour or so earlier, trading the rise that made the blue line come up. It is good that both oscillators support the lazy M picture, but it is not good if they encourage you to go long after the M because what you get is a small rise and more HE. So where you ask "is this an icon" or "is this the true icon" I would say neither is an icon or any sort of reliable signal, it is dangerous stuff that is likely to be followed by a small rise, then a pull down, then the next ladder step up. But I am only guessing that because the blue line at the left of the picture looks like there had been a ladder step up to this price which is actually an HE and most of an HE is dangerous to trade. Both Fisher and Chimp give you big green swings after the M, but I think that is bad because it is staying in HE and not developing, I get in trouble here myself looking for entry too early during an HE and both Fisher and Chimp look like something big is going to happen but it doesnt. If pull back and a rise came after this, then that would be the time to buy the dip. If your Fisher oscillator doesnt give you trade signals on the right hand side of this picture, then I would say that is good, keeps you out of trouble. Looks like it is too early to be entering a trade there. Also important, did fisher give you good signals for entering the rise that happened before this picture, because it looks like the big money happened earlier. One of the problems with a more volatile pair like EURJPY is that it will pullback further thru the blue line than it would with audusd. It is harder to get and keep the "big picture" in your mind. Maybe using an extra chart, maybe 30min or 1 hr would help keep a "bigger picture" for you, I don't know. It is your preferences that matter, finding what works best for you. Good luck and I hope I have not confused you, I am no expert trader yet. Bruce /PYenner

I'm not sure if I am answering the right question here, lack of sleep perhaps. Why did I leave out the third stage of the adx?The first two stages process a mix of momentum and price thru ema smoothing, those two stages are relatively compatible with each other. The third stage uses a different form of historical access, it samples n=adx_bars on a bar by bar basis. That puts it out of step with the method ema's use, which sample only the current bar and add it in to a single weighted average, they only ever deal with just two numbers, not n=adx_bars of numbers. Ema's essentially follow the recent price more closely than most forms of averaging and the third stage was further behind reality than the first two stages. This could have the output going down slightly (say) at a time when the price is tending up (say). On an adx, the main signal line only cares about the strength of the movement, it does not care which direction the movement is in. But the oscillator did need to distinquish up from down and thanks to the third stage it was having trouble getting this right. It was apparent when the oscillator was near the zero line, that it was getting + and - mixed up, there would be jerky movements, zigzagging across the zero line. The quick answer was to remove the third stage which was causing the error. I have since got to a stage were it might be possible to put the adx_bars thing back in again without causing a problem but I have not had time to look at it and I am not sure if there is a need to go further with it. A desensitizing setting has since been added to partly undo the increase in sensitivity that happened when the third stage was removed. Progress comes in pieces, one step at a time, so things are always kind of interim. If I have answered the wrong question then please try asking again. Cheers Bruce

Walter First the good news, MT4 can do horizonal bars, they call them Rays. So pvp display is possible. Then comes the bad news. The vmap uses a linear sum or average, whichever you chose to call it. That means it has to be restarted regularly, it can't be left running continuously without slowing down the platform to a crawl. More than that, the weight of accumulating historical data will soon make it insensistive to new incoming data and the signal will go flatline. If the pvp uses a similar process then it has the same problem. If you stick with the fix they are using, restarting it every few hours, then you have the problem of what rule do you use about when you restart it, how long you wait for it to warm up, and how much user time you have before you should restart it again. If pvp and vwap have the same insides then they both need to be restarted at the same time. It is primative at a very basic level, you change anything at that level, to turn it into using ema's so you dont have to restart it all the time, then firstly it becomes a different beast and secondly it has a new set of limitations in place of the old ones. Now I have not looked at bollinger or other things that use variance or standard deviation, but I dont see those things getting restarted so I suspect the thing needs to be redesigned from the ground up so that it does use running averages in the same way as other instruments appear to do. I can see little point in duplicating the existing software onto MT4, it needs to be designed with a more practical approach. The present design is unstable, it has not been thought out far enough to make it stable and that should have been the starting point from the beginning. You could say it is running on tyres that keep going flat and need to be pumped up every few hours. Any version you come up with will have the same problems with smoothing (long history samples) making the signal slow to respond to incoming data. It might make more sense to start with bollinger and modify it to include volume. It appears to need about 4hrs of data or 48 bars on a 5 min chart or 200 plus on a 1min chart. I have not tried a bb that slow but comparing a slow bb to a normal one might give a picture of what might be done or might be needed.

Duplicating green lines from 5min and 1hr charts in a 1 min chart. The Dark Blue line in the 1min chart has ADX_Bars=200 and it is very similar to a green line with ADX_Bars= 4 on a 1hr chart, now 200/60=3.3 but 4 or 3 are the nearest whole numbers. In Walters template for 5min chart the green line has ADX_Bars= 4. If a line is added to the 1min chart with ADX_Bars= 20, it will duplicate the green line from the 5min chart, 20/5=4 the green line setting. So for 15min or 30 min charts, a similar process might be followed for duplicating green lines from those charts inside a 1min chart... So where I suggested in a previous post to try a line with ADX_Bars= 24 in a 1min chart, a more sensible number would have been 20 since it replicates the 5min green line nicely.

Sundowner Hadn't intended it as a replacement for the axis. Just as a help in any pair. EURJPY is a volatile pair, it might be difficult to find a good axis. The axis line does a similar job to the old Magenta line on the fantail. It needs to be a slow line but a volatile pair like EURJPY will leave it far behind on a centifugal thrust and will also cross it more extremely on a centripetal thrust or pullback. EURJPY can also behave like a fairly normal pair at times too. I'm not sure that there will be an answer to this problem. The interpretation may just remain more complicated. Walters interest in vwap may be some help with this problem. I like the simplicity of the two line approach but I have this compulsion not just to "read" the market but to anticipate the next move and that last bit in particular gets me into trouble too often.

Sundowner I'm the sort of bone head that always has to make sense of things in my own dumn way and probably the hard way. Yeah shouldn't have complicated things by adding 1hr charts. Yeah adding some more lines can help make sense of things. On 1min chart maybe also try adding adxvma6_12bar, but set it to 10 bars and maybe line thickness=2 so you can see it easier. Might give another view of where some HEs are. Whatever helps...

Second pix with second copy of 6_16 running in red on 1hr chart, set to 16 bars.

Sundowner Maybe this pix will help. "slide the blue line to the left" to see the PRICE and ACTUAL time when the "PRICE" HE started ok? I was hoping to come up with a set of straight lines through the price rise stage that might help give an earlier idea of when and where the HE started. But have not got that far yet. There will be a vma line that is more suited to 1hr charts that will show an HE a lot earlier (but also at a higher price). eg use the reset button on ADXVMA6_16bar to bring it closer to real time. We will get there... Yeah max confusion sometimes...

Ditto. One day=dream next day=nightmare This is about chart time I suspect. I have problems when the blue line is horizontal or due to become horizontal because the momentum has already slowed and the "ladder step" has already finished but I don't realize it soon enough and the blue line is too late telling me the news. Instead of thinking "scalp the swings during HE or stay out" I alternate between expecting the next ladder step or a pull back before the next ladder step or looking for a reversal. So I whipsaw myself, completely out of step with NOW and alternating between possible future trends. I have loaded Walters template for 5min chart onto a 1hr chart and am finding the stages of price movement involved with each ladder step has a pattern. But you have to mentally "slide the blue line to the left" to see where the price of the HE will be for the blue line. You can only do that with a historical chart, but the idea is to help identify from the price action alone where the HE price will be, before it happens. That might not make sense without doing a video to show you. I suspect the same will apply on 1min price action. Walter has enough chart savvy to see this directly from the price action. He sees the patterns, we need to learn them. Like you I am attempting to trade patterns before I know what they look like. Most of all I find myself whipsaw trading during HEs, the very opposite of what this whole thread has been about. Man does it make you feel dumb:crap: In my case, I am ahead of the price action and it is more about getting the time scale and sequence during the HE stage into my head so I don't go trading "break outs" long before they are due. When Walter says the green line doesn't whipsaw you, there is an exception, when you are in the first half of a price HE (it happens before the blue line shows it, in fact the blue line may be halfway up its ladder rise at the time(on 1hr chart)) you do get whipsaw from the green line and that can be taken as the sign that you are in HE NOW. In the case of a rising ladder, the price seems to rise during the second half of the HE (dome or inverted cup) then drop into pullback, crossing or touching the blue line just before the fast rise at the begining of the next step up. But this is on the 1hr chart ok, the 1hr blue line. Still learning patterns here...

Walter Eurjpy can be a wild one, fast mover, ok pip margin. Also Gbpusd can be a big mover. If you want a tiger fight then Gbpjpy is the "arena" where blood gets spilled imo, maximum chaos, bad pip margin.

It makes a lot of sense to me Hechua. You are not alone here, this is a good place to be.

Walter That helps a lot, nice intro/summary. Looks easier than I first thought, even looks useful. Had seen that the vwap threads were popular but had not gone into it. It is probably the sensible option as you say. Will start looking at it. Don't expect overnight delivery. Cheers

Hi Unicorn Umm it could take a while to explain all that goes on in an ADX which is where it comes from. Now the ADX is a momentum indicator but when you use smoothing it affectively adds in some of the price and the momentum signal gets to look more and more like the price action. In some ways that can be good, easy to recognize, but in other ways it is confusing if you are wanting to be able to distinquish momentum from price. Without smoothing, a momentum indicator will tell you if the last tick or ticks went up or down, by crossing the zero line, green or red with every tick and mostly it just alternates either side of zero and only spikes or ladders briefly then drops straight back to zero. So an honest momentum oscillator only tells you the speed of the price movement and that is only a small part of what a trader wants to know. A trader mostly wants to know price movement because his P/L is what its all about. When you use smoothing, you get that price intrusion whether you want it or not, mostly it is ok but it can make for contradictions if you start asking why did it do that, what is it telling me? If a momentum oscillator has little smoothing, you would start and end a trade on a zero crossing, trade the "hump" becuse it is telling you the speed and direction of movement. If there is more smoothing, it starts to resemble price and then you sell the peak and buy the dip. Different timing, different thinking. Both from price peaks and from momentum peaks and from comparing differences between the two you can get overbought or lazy signals. Like everything else, these quarantee nothing but it still helps to forewarn you about which way the price might switch in the near future. Also the amount of smoothing can alter the relative heights of two peaks, it will only ever offer a warning, not a hard rule. The ADX swings in only one direction, zero to one, some changes had to be made to get it to swing red and green. Removing the final stage (of three) made this possible but also made it "wild". The input is very sensitive and it had been the output stage that helped to reduce sensitivity to small changes under certain circumstances like pullback or reversal. The Bemac vma exploited that circumstantial lack of sensitivity in making HE's. Both he and Walter were sharp in seeing its benefit. Without that third stage, the signal swings like a reed in the breeze. It is still an oridinary momenum signal. It is still an ADX signal, but its "sensitivity curve" differs from ADX, its a real swinger. One difficulty I have with mixing price with momentum is say on an up ladder, when there is pullback a momentum signal should immediately swing into red. With price mixed in, you only see it move down some toward the red and you ask, how seriously should I take that? Then when it does pullback across zero, what does that mean, is that total disaster or will it recover? Where pullback is concerned, I dont yet know how to read it, what is safe etc. Chart time is the only way to find an answer. As Walter says, it is best used for confirmation, not as the only tool. It has given me grief when the blue line is flat and its good swings have me trading a price that goes nowhere, I can be a bit thick at times, single minded. You only get to trade price swings, big fat momentum swings cant be traded sadly. This might go on forever. Re Cog icon Yes I see the cog and I also take it to mean "working" or "thinking". I see no point in having negative options to begin with. The only time I tinkered with those icons I ended up giving myself a thumbs up and felt like a twit afterwards so I try to avoid those ones now. Regards to all Bruce

Hehehe And "4 bar" is preset to 3. Its a diabolical plot to send BluRay bananas. Welcome to the club, ouch ouch..:crap:

Walter -->You tell me if this could be done eventually.. Maybe some chance yes, dunno when. Going to have a go at putting the adx_bars thing back into Chimp oscillator now that it manages to swing both ways without doing odd things. The ADX_bars thing makes the HEs, dunno whats going to happen, time will tell. If it aint nutty then may get a chance at another variation on vma for the main chart too. Cheers