PYenner

Armand The oscillator is quite wild and tends to get me in trouble when the blue line is flat, the thing that moves the most seems to get my attention. For my own sanity I now tend to wait for the blue line to trend before I get excited. I think the short fast movements during consolidation get ahead of 5min indicators and they become contradictory. Concepts like overbought or lazy are some use with the oscillator but it helps if there is trend which tends to give longer (time) cycles which suit 5min indicators better, then they are more in step with the action. Unfortunately we seem to have had a lot of flat blue line recently which has not helped at all. Regards Bruce.

Hi Cameron Sounds like you have come to the right place, hope it all goes well for you.

Walter Vwap signals of some sort might be possible but might end up with a primative form of display depending on what capabilities MT4 has for horizontal histograms or whatever. Do you need all those lines or just a pointer moving on a line between two end points whatever?? Afraid it kinda seemed like a "bounce between 2 HEs" theory to me, need to read more I guess. imo statistics belong in the past because that is all they apply to. For Chimp3_1 on 1min try 2 2 1 1 maybe...

Chimp3_1.mq4 The directional confusion should be fixed now. A desensitizing option has been added to tame the wild chimp. Can be set from 0 up. Preset to 1.0 but try 0.5 and 1.5. May prefer different settings on 1min and 5min charts. With DeSens set to 1, the smaller swings look smaller and give less encouragement to trade exhausted markets. Also looks a bit saner. The preset level settings at 3 pips and 6 pips have been removed because the useful level marker settings will now depend on how much DeSens is used. The idea was to support use of a rule to stay out of the market if the swings are below 0.2 say?? Whatever works out as a useful combination of DeSens setting and swings big enough to trade. Level markers can still be setup by the user to suit... Chimp3_1.mq4

tradertom I have only been doing scalps recently because the market seems to lack confidence and trends dont seem to last long. I have not been systematic because I have usually been pursuing some one aspect like trying to pick the quick trades and try to get the entry timing spot on, quick in and out stuff. It is building towards a full setup but it has been progressive. Encouraging at least.

Trading will always need some "BA", but this sure helps keep your B out of a vice, gotta be close to a dream come true Walter.

Template works fine on XP, but on Vista I seem to have to compile any new indicators using MetaEditor before MT4 can find them and use them from a template. Working fine on both now.

Makes sense to me.First identify which stage of a cycle it is in, then trade it accordingly. Good systematic approach. Pattern recognition gets easier within each stage once a stage is categorized.

hehehe yeah, bit of a zoo here, or maybe a circus, or maybe its like yellow brick road since there is a Wizard involved, had been wondering about calling him Gandalf, now wondering about Oz. Keep those beers and nanas coming...

It might be possible to count the volume from the tick movements, then you would have volume, but that doesn't mean it would be a piece of cake... Have not been able to get my head around this stuff yet, volume tends to have different meanings at different stages in a cycle, which is just what Walter may be talking about. But then momentum can also be that way. So don't know if it is a coincidence or if volume is actually needed. More questions than answers, situation normal :doh::crap::helloooo: Still experimental, nowhere near a finished product. I'm going to go with the flow for now, and catch up on the complications as and when... Do like the direction Walter is headed in though.

Yes, the volume thing needs more work from me before it should get any from you. Very early days. It is, wanted it to be a branch on its own, it is not vma related. Yes thats all the pip input does. It was to save people having to put in "fixed max" and min each time they use it. MT4 doesn't let me preset fixed max and min so tried to find the next best way. Also the 0.0003 and 0.0006 lines will be a pest on any pair other than audusd, they really need to be done in pips too so they adjust to other pairs, but for now thats as far as it has got. Sorry for the shambles.

Sorry for leaving litter everywhere while bouncing between walls... Still enjoying some nice wee scalps. Using 6Tick1 and 2 and hoping to start seeing useful patterns from it, time will tell. Would still like to have a better handle on how far pullback will go but as with everything else, the market tries not to make it easy.

Things seem like a huge mess to me, needs tidying up, junk everywhere...

Walter I did not expect this oscillator thing to turn into a search for truth. Nor do I know how much use an honest momentum oscillator will be for trading. Its hard to know where to go from here since it now looks like use of smoothing causes all sorts of mixing of price and momentum to happen. Maybe I got onto a side track here but I have a fondness for indicators that stick close to reality and don't play games with it. Need to think about where to go from here now. The adx parts have different side effects when you try to use them for a different purpose. I get pictures in my head of things that might be done but so far none of them are inspirational. My thoughts on using ChimpMom with a vma (no adx) so far are limited. They might look like the price was pulling around a number of vma lines, each being pulled by a "rubber band" of different length. Aside from the fact that all those lines would tend to converge on the current price during consolidation, its hard to picture a benefit from it. Without an adx or some fancy stuff, they are not going to have much in the way of HEs. Just puzzling.

ChimpMom1.mq4 This is as close as I can get to an honest momentum oscillator. If you step thru the data bar by bar you should find that the momentum reading is equal to the difference in close prices compared to the previous bar. It has two dummy signal lines built in which are preset to 10 pips and are intended to prevent the pane closing too far while not preventing it from opening further. On 5min charts or on more volatile pairs you might want to set it to more pips. MT4 does not send out every tick to every chart. Instead it sometimes accumulates ticks then sends out the total. You may have seen this happening with other indicators too. They appear to do it when the price movements contradict themselves, so MT4 might be trying to minimize "noise" when they do this. Might pay to be aware of it and rely on chart price for exact entry and exit because it looks like indicators can be behind on the play. Despite being one of the simplest indicators to write, this one has been educational on what a complex job the platforms have to do when processing both bars and ticks. So for once in my life I'm not going to moan about platforms. ChimpMom1.mq4

Chimp1_6Mom.mq4 This one shows honest momentum in pips/min (for 1min chart) with no smoothing. But if you add some smoothing you get a price bias favouring the trend as well as some lag, looks more attractive but it isn't reality. Is a genuine momentum oscillator any use for trading, or does it just tell you what you already found out the hard way? It will be interesting to see how vma reacts when it gets fed the truth with no BS... Chimp1_6Mom.mq4

There is some trend confusion in all the chimps. The adx was built to work with positive values only, getting it to work with + and - has only been partly achieved not fully achieved so far. This is just a quick look to see if it is worth taking any further.

On second thoughts, it can do a bit more than just smooth. If weightDX and weightOut have similar numbers, it may reduce the ripple near the zero line, just guessing.

Yes just a visual smoother for the displayed line. Yes the "directional bias" is not good, it would need some thinking to figure out a fix. This may be the source of the glitches that have bugged me all the way through...

Chimp2_1.mq4 This is a hybrid, halfway between price and price/volume. Chimp2_2.mq4 This uses price/volume instead of price. The vma versions have not been done yet. If there is such a thing as smart money, then Chimp2 is more likely to show it up than Chimp1, will the differences have a tactical significance? Chimp2_1.mq4 Chimp2_2.mq4

Chimp1_4.mq4 Second time lucky. It ULd it but forgot to attach it?? Chimp1_4.mq4

Chimp1_4.mq4 Added WeightDX and WeightOut. If large numbers are used with WeightDX it can cause "directional confusion", sharp little movements from plus to minus. WeightOut can partly smooth these out but causes delays. So many possibilities... Not sure if something might be done to fix the "confusion". Having both numbers high might produce something like an HE, ignores the small stuff, shows the pulls? Still has the adxbars thing left out though.

Chimp1_2.mq4 Has the weight set at 5 as Sundowner suggested and the colour corrected to Lime (which is actually true green). If you want the red and green to look stronger, increase their line thickness to 2. There was a problem with the previous setting of 8, the smoothing gives time delay and you have the momentum indicator still showing green while you can see that the price is dropping. Using 5 reduces the problem but does not fix it. You still need to close on a peak, when in an ideal world with a momentum oscillator, you would close and perhaps reverse on a zero crossing. But the smoothing means that the indicator is showing a mixture of momentum and something like past prices. Ideal may not matter, so long as your trading rule can cope with the limitations of the tools you are using. Chimp1_3.mq4 A more volatile version that you may end up trashing, but before you trash it try increasing the smoothing weights and you may find a compromise you like. Volatility is dangerous, the whole idea of an HE was to keep you from trading small swings. This indicator exaggerates small swings and that can have you trying to trade price swings that are smaller than the momentum swings. Dangerous and maybe stressful dealing with frequent "false alarm" swings. Momentum x Time = price movement. Its about how long the momentum signal stays on one side of the zero line. Its not just about the first flick, its about which side it stays on. Fast swings mean the price is going nowhere, stay out. It has its uses but interpretation and rules may be important with this one to keep you out of trouble. Experiment with the settings, faster and slower, maybe find something that works for you. This one is more about trading the live ticks than looking at historical bars. The faster settings make it harder to interpret reliably (can drive you nuts). Don't trade with 1_3 on its own, use 1_2 as your main guide maybe. Having copies running in a 5min chart may also give you a useful perspective to balance the 1min view. Chimp1_2.mq4 Chimp1_3.mq4

Sundowner Long may it continue. Also had a nice string of wee scalps and not sure what to make of it. The benefit of Walters experience also has me thinking with concepts I have not used before so I am not sure what to "blame" for the success. It seems a lot like standard momentum, yet I also find the way it brings out the pauses is a lot to my liking, fits with a way of trading that comes naturally to me. It also shares its insides with the main vma indicator so I wonder if that makes things work together a bit better. I'm glad it is not just me that got the impression that something was working a bit better. Regards

Cheers dudes. Change the Green color to Lime so you can see it easier in Chimp1_1.