ezduzzit

While I am always saddened to read of yet another trader getting duped by a slick, high pressure marketer.. as others have said, it absolutely comes with the territory and there's nothing wiser than to just accept the lesson and move on under your own steam to learn things on your own. The current flavor of the day is that each of these trading gurus is going to show you their secret ways of detecting what the Smart Money ("SM") is doing and if you will just shadow them you cannot fail to keep on the right side of the trade and make money. PIFFLE! Pure balderdash... If it were so easy to consistently discern and mimic SM tactics just from watching volume and context, etc. don't you think a heckuva lot more of the floor traders who attempt to make the transfer over to screen trading could figure that out a lot easier than you or I? Well, truth is. .extremely few of them make the transition to becoming a profitable screen trader. As retail traders we also don't have the account size to continue buying as it declines (where might it stop, eh?) just as an example. I daresay that a good number of the prior floor traders may only have made money in the pits because of either developing a good "feel" for the live action in the pits or else they were even better at keeping an eagle eye out for newbie floor reps and taking the other side of their trades. Trading is a tough, tough business mostly because we tend to either terribly complicate it with scads of indicators and theories or we lose sight of just trading what we see, in constant attempts to figure out WHY the market is doing what it is doing, when we THINK it should be doing something else (one of the potentially dire risks of having a personal bias unless you are a really sharp money manager). Don't trust anybody else's ideas until you try them out for yourself and see if they work for you. If you have to pay much of anything for them, you are probably better off taking a pass. As an earlier poster pointed out.. likely you couldn't trade their method anywhere near as well as they can, if in fact that "guru" even trades for real money now or if he/she ever did. Get yourself some good trading buddies and stay in touch with them. I used to think I was doing pretty well..until one of my buds let loose with some info he said he thought was pretty outstanding if he could just get his mindset and emotions under control to trade it. He used to bug me with detail after detail about his ideas, etc. until one day I finally had enough and set aside some time to really evaluate what he was saying in order to show him that his method was probably not viable. Well, surprise! I can trade his method much more successfully than my own now yet he still can't make money with it. So, if trading is really in your blood, keep your money in your pocket or in your account, put in tremendous amounts of screen time and talk regularly to other real money traders (not during trading hours!) that have been around the block a time or two. You may never end up with a real mentor but all you really need is 1 to 3 very simple and consistently profitable set ups to become expert at. The rest is all about learning about yourself and fitting what you are and how you act into how the market operates. All the best to James and the many great contributors in this forum, E Z

I, for one, think you do a pretty darned good job James. I don't visit much these days as I pretty much just trade my buns off during this long-awaited volatility and stick to my own knitting so to speak. That being said, despite all the newbie posts for gold I do still enjoy stopping by once in awhile and picking through the pile for those rare tidbits that offer a gem of lasting value. I think your removing that rule will probably prove a good decision. E Z

I tend to stick with piano music as it soothes the savage beast. I stream piano music from my non trading pc from http://www.solopianoradio.com (the free version). Also enjoy a couple of CD's a friend gifted to me from http://www.liquidmindmusic.com and find these to also be great while practicing Tai-Chi. Happy Trading To All..

Good to find you here RumpledOne. I used this indicator of yours (before the latest enhancements) when I was using ESignal charting. I am mostly intersted in just this one enhanced indicator at this point, but I now use NinjaTrader charting. Might you be able to direct me to someone whom I can contact to get it coded for NinjaTrader which uses C# ? Keep up the great work RO and as usual, happy trading to all

Thanks to both of you (Pivot and Cooter) for the info. I will attend Joel's live demo this coming Wednesday. I already went through the TG bootcamp a good while back and have reviewed the cd's of that program as well at home a couple of times. I am afraid I have to agree 100% with your feelings about TG's current customer policies if you don't buy their software. But so be it, as I have seen their software and it really does not interest me. I do think that I will buy and study the book though, as I got a sense there were a large number of examles therein. I did read a tiny smattering of Richard Ney's stuff as well, which I found interesting but a bit hard to decipher at times. They could certainly stand some updating. Thanks again to you two and all the other contributors here for a very interesting thread. Happy Trading

I cannot speak to what the ESignal datafeed was like over a year ago as I have only used ESignal for the past year but I have never had any problems with it at all. I cannot say the same for their advanced charting as most computers, including most Iintel based dual core etc.. have difficulties running ESig's advanced charting in fast markets. It seems AMD has the upperhand in chipsets for the time being, as admitted begrudingly by Intel's move to the same architecture being run by AMD chipsets for over a year already. Fortunately, my off the shelf Sony which is a year old is somehow designed so that it runs it all without the slightest snag (lucky me, compared to some of the horror stories other traders have shared with me.) TS charting, which is free if you trade just 10 round trip futures contracts per month (pretty minimal if you ask me) is darn hard to beat if you don't require lots of market profile stuff or constant volume bar charting. Even Ninja Trader's Version 6 charting platform, which should be released a week from this coming Monday, is rapidly approaching state of the art and could be a nice choice once the Zenfire brokers begin providing historical data enough to run daily, weekly and monthly charts.. as you can only run hourly and below currently. It runs OHLC and volume bar charts quite efficiently as well from what I can tell, but you never know what surprises lurk in new versions. Good luck with whatever you choose and do let us know if other meaningful issues surface in your testing. Happy Trading

Browns... I would think twice about migrating over to Multi as many say it is full of basic bugs and slow as molasses compared to TS. I have run volume based charts on both ESignal and Ninja Trader and had no problems whatsoever. Ensign is certainly another strong contender for what you desire. ESignal just never stops increasing its prices and in fact recently announced an upcoming price increase again for July 1, but I will say that it does provide a reliable and clean datafeed compared to most. Good luck in your transition.. I too would make a changeover if I were wishing to use volume bars and got what TS provides you. Happy Trading

Hello Dupaski.. Have you found a place to upload the video above refrenced? I am sure there are some of us who would like to see it if you really don't mind going to the trouble to post it. Also.. to PP... you once mentioned Joel Pozen with reference to VSA. I found out he does a mentoring program, but it certainly is not inexpensive at $4,000. Is he really that great a mentor or do you feel the key concepts can be learned by an experienced trader from intensive effort spent with the book and the bootcamp alone? Do please keep this thread going. I find it to be one of the most interesting threads in the entire forum thus far. Happy Trading

Ahhh.. someone here finally brought it out into the open. Kudos to you BrownsFan! It is indeed true that until you have true confidence that your method has a tradeable edge, you will continue to search and adjust until you eventually have to scrap it all and go back to where you started. Now I would say that over time, most traders have heard that already and went "yeah, we know that and agree" but then they cast it off and forget about it. At the risk of sounding dogmatic here, I am telling you it will keep showing up and smacking you in the face at the worst times until you accept it as fact and focus on it until you truly have a firm confidence in the method you trade. Without that, you are irretrievably lost. There comes a time when you simply must call a halt to the searching, changing, tweaking and fine tuning and simply decide to become expert at your method and only tweak it once in awhile to adapt to real character changes in the market. I like this thread and I must say I continue to really enjoy this forum. Keep up the wonderful postings. Happy Trading

Having sat through 4 long sessions awhile back with the boyz from TradeGuider.. I agree that VSA has some merit, but I also agree with your final comments, Profiler.... as TTM/Heikin Ashi candlesticks are not truly compatible with using VSA. Either way, I am glad to see this thread get started, so thanks for that, Tin Gull. Happy Trading

Hrrumpff! The swing and position traders I know who thought they were well prepared to trade intraday have usually had their heads handed to them by the market in fairly short order. It's just not quite the same game despite the promotions by many system sellers to the contrary. One man's price action is another man's order flow, if you get the drift. It is not simply a matter of scaling down. The same instrument trades quite differently intraday than it does weekly or monthly. Can some make the transition? Sure.. but experience in one is certainly no assurance of success in the other. Happy Trading

Ok.. once again off topic of the thread but I will put it a slightly different way. How you perceive and assess risk, price action, etc. is likely very different than how I do so. Your market experience and the mindset and background you bring to your trading is also likely very different from mine. Thus, I am going to tell you that how you specifically decide to cut your losses quickly and dispassionately is far less important than your discipline in simply doing it time after time without fail. Only you can come up with a method that really works for you. Don't worry about the opportunity cost loss from missing an occasional trade that turned around and ran a mile in your original direction. That can and does happen to everyone, regarldess of method, on occasion. If you are so terribly convinced it is definitely turning around and will leave you at the station, while running for the hills then there is nothing but your pride and a small commission cost prohibiting you from jumping back in. If you kept that earlier loss small (and don't forget that it is often a small profit or breakeven instead of a loss) then you won't feel bad at all for having bailed out early only to get back in. I daresay that your equity growth over the long haul will keep you feeling good about following such a method. Now let's let these fine forum members have their interesting thread back. Happy Trading

Ok GCB... Yes, I agree that your questions may be off topic to this thread, but suffice it to say that I play basically with disaster stops put in place only for rapid and unexpected reversals. They are not there to "give the market room to work". That would be like saying, "Well, the trade is on, my job is done, let the stop loss protect me and let's see where I end up". Any fool can enter a position. Your real job is to manage the trades you put on so as to let as much of your position ride to the fullest profit possible, only after you have assured yourself that the market and price activity are not proving you wrong, in which case your job is to get out as soon as possible, preferrably at breakeven to a small profit or, failing that, with a tiny loss so that you live to fight another battle and your emotions aren't in total turmoil for the rest of the session. As soon as I open a position I am highly focused on looking for changes that might indicate my trade was wrongly positioned or ill timed. If the market does not move in my favor in extremely short order, I simply bail on the posiition at breakeven to a tiny profit if possible or else a very tiny loss and wait for a better trade. Do I take more losses than I used to? Yes, I do.. but I dont mind at all as they are tiny compared to before and even after I add them up, my profitable trades easily outstrip them. Understand that not every trader is going to agree with what I have said and that is fine. But, do consider this: you often find traders singing the praises of scaling out quite early on their profitable trades and leaving on a small "runner" to see if the trade really goes somewhere. Why then is it that many of those same traders will sit glassy eyed with their full position size intact as a trade works its way all the way back to their stop loss and takes them out? Is it because they couldn't see price activity clearly headed in the wrong direction? No, I think it stems from two things: 1) their fear of admitting they were wrong and taking a loss (even tho it could be a very small one if they acted promptly) and 2) they are almost soley focused on profit taking and not on capital preservation through controlling the size of their losses. It is one thing to consider "risking" the size of your stop and lot size. It is quite another to just give it away. Happy Trading

Hmm... a very interesting little thread though I am not quite sure exactly what we are discussing here to be sure. It sounds somewhat like what have we learned along the way to becoming successful traders. I would have to agree that you'll fare far better in this fun but highly challenging pursuit if you have a passion for it. However, it is sometimes easy to get carried away with the fun and forget it is a business. Someone mentioned early on about a lack of meaningful capital being a crutch for newbie traders. While I was fortunate not to be in that position, sometimes an excess of capital can prove to be as big of a handicap (I doubt you meant to say "crutch") as too little capital, but for very different reasons. I quickly learned a lot about myself as I dove headlong into trading. Being disciplined is probably the only truly useful trait I brought with me from my prior career success, other than an extreme appreciation for capital preservation (I was a banker of all things heh, heh) that assisted me in this trial by fire of becoming a profitable trader. My pride, my supposed intelligence, my willingness to stick with a bad situation in hopes of turning it around and other traits that worked so well for me in prior days, served mostly as ways to lay more of my money on the table for the pros to stuff into their own bank accounts. Now I finally do take a good amount of money out of the market on a regular basis, but it came more from following an absurdly simple trading plan with position sizing and money management as 90% of my focus. I learned in the most direct way that this is a game of losses, not a game of profits. If you focus on managing the losses and keeping them small, you will make it. In other words, to Hell with being right. If the market doesn't go in your favor soon after getting in, then get the heck out and cut those potential losers unmercifully. I learned not to over-think any of this and stop trying to complicate it with new and improved methods and indicators. Price, time and support and resistance seem to me to be the only technical keys to the kingdom here and even knowing all that, it will all come to naught (nothing) if you cannot control your emotions in the heat of the moment and execute almost flawlessly on a few simple rules, over and over again. I think Soultrader once said the market will quickly teach you a lot about yourself. I couldn't agree more. Happy Trading

The thread starter's comment as regards the uptick rule wasn't that futures trading was going to get hit with it but instead that it was likely to be eliminated sometime in the foreseeable future from stock trading. I recall having read that myself in a couple of places other than forum threads in the past few months. So, while it may have some merit, I don't know anyone that could put any realistic deadline to it. Happy Trading