This seems to be have been happening for a couple of weeks or so and is most welcome (See the Increasing, decreasing, ... thread). Rollover to U9 necessitated the finetuning of some TL's and as well provided several surprises related to slopes, end points and starting points when compared to M9. Although I have been talking mostly about RTL's it should be very clear to all, that might be concerned, that the channel (gen.) LTL is an essential component of the method and is not to be considered to have been disregarded by me in the current discussion. Speaking just for myself, I found P2 to be one of the trickier entities to deal with in the sense of whether the P2 which I was tracking was the 'real' P2. This clearly continues to give a lot of people a lot of problems - the incompletion in the face of completion conundrum. And the VE. As Cole Younger said in, The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid, "It's a wonderment." A deeper appreciation of the phenomenon of anticipation compared to prediction has visiteth me. Again, anticipation involves waiting for the market to do what is anticipated, while prediction imposes a contrived time of occurence on whatever it is that is believed to be 'coming up'. The former is Boolean, the latter, dangerously probabilistic. Finally my take on this past Friday's PFC is that given what happened, we definitely do not yet have completion. lj http://www.youtube.com/watch?[uv=MoXrMOsnRVo&feature=related
The liabilities of laterals show forth in my dyspronouncement concerning the PFC. When one strips away the LM (beginning at 2:45), the last three bars of the day show completion. YM shows the same. Lateral constructions can be helpful at times (like this AM) but inappropriate use and/or overuse can have unpleasant side effects. As always context is critical. There was a useful discussion of some of these points in the IR thread over the weekend. lj
Some time ago in my search for truth and knowledge in the markets, I purchased a book called "The Market Maker's Edge" written by Josh Lukeman. It's probably been 'reviewed' by various entities on ET and equally probably been described as being out-of-date and immaterial to what is happening today. Certain things don't change and one of them is the ensemble of time frames to monitor if you are a discretionary trader and if you believe in the utility of looking at the market in multiple time frames (time fractals). Lukeman from his vantage point as a MM suggested that intraday, one use the 60 min, 15 min, 5 min and/or 2 min. Hmmm. That sounds familiar. He also suggested that when looking for a 'move of consequence (my terminology)', one monitor from the slowest time to the faster time. Hmmm X 2. Yes it does mean more work, both prep-wise and intraday but when one considers the other kind of work one could be doing when one blows up and then gets onto the fast track at Chez Mac, perhaps it is worth the effort. If nothing else it will fill in those empty hours and empty spaces in your day and on your chart. lj
I got this book from the library when I started trading last year and immediately bought it from Amazon. I've recommended this book to many people on ET since then and it's on my list of best trading books. His opening chapters on risk management and position size are priceless.
I enjoyed it when I bought it and still do. It is also a keeper for me, a survivor of my 'trading stuff I don't need no more' purge of earlier this year. lj
As any good VSA practitioner will tell you, context is always to the left. The current IR discussion on the OB has, IMO, degenerated into an 'angels on the head of a pin' fest and misses the critical contextual point, because the RTL of consequence is likewise missing. The events of this AM are such that even 'sliders' won't miss what is up. If one is going to slide one must do it all the time. As I have said before my view is that 'sliding' and rigor are oxymoronic but if you find that sliding 'works' for you, all of the time (in other words it is a Boolean operation) then perfetto. My preference is always for nature in the raw and hence the current nested sandboxes with a single common edge paradigm. We'll see how long this one lasts but present evidence suggests a modicum of promise. It is well to remember Spyder's assertion some months back, that there is only one correct annotation. Now while I do not agree with him on all points pertaining to the method, I am in 100% agreement with his aforementioned assertion. I used to think the market was best likened to a woman but that is not so. The only deus ex machina, you will find, is one constructed from the sweat of your brow. Damascus steel comes to mind when thinking of the fineness of the cut of the market but a ruler and protractor seem better suited to fashion the necessary construct. A chance siting of a dusky thrush this AM in the garden but I'll need to confirm this. It is so interesting that when looking at a bird often times as soon as you spy it, it takes flight. Coincidence or Heisenberg, but then Albert said Heisenberg was full of shit. lj http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYFK1R-wUwg&feature=related
It wasn't a dusky thrush but rather a spotted towhee. Doh! Since formally departing the IR thread, I have spent some time looking for Booleans and have found one. Several others are in the 'conditional' phase and although none are worth discussing at this point in time, there was a razzer nice one today. What is worth mentioning is this. The best way to screw up a perfectly good market Boolean condition (a tell, in other words) is to place it in the straight-jacket of a time constraint. Which is to say that instead of waiting patiently for the future to become present (to become the 'now' as Jack might say), one attempts (always unsuccessfully, I might add) to drag the future into the present with brute force and intimidation. Briefly put, the 'time-independent' Boolean is the perfect tell. Fuck with it at your certain peril. lj From "Sixteen Stone": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Er1bwzZCik0&feature=related
The above paragraph may have sounded to some like a PeeWee Herman, "So?" kind o' thing but it does have pertinence to the holding and hoping that can occur when one incorrectly annotates and calls a faux P1 (= FTT). The bailout price (or if you're ballsy, the reversal price) is of course 1 tick outside the faux P1. One bails when one doesn't appreciate WTF is going on, as nkhoi has mentioned elsewhere. The failure lies not in the method but in the operator, something the dough-heads on the B-team just can't comprehend. For me, the concomitant use of YM2 with ES5 is a must. I'm just not good enough to only use ES5 and what's more I don't really care about getting to be good enough to use just the ES5. There is simply too much leading information available on the YM2 for it to be abandoned. For example, YM2 (the RFTH version [RFTH = regular futures trading hours]) clearly pointed out YESTERDAY, that what I should do with ES5 (yesterday) was fan my major RTL (in this case RTL does equate to RCL = right channel line) to the second double top. When one does that, the events of this AM flop out. If you don't fan, there is a disconnect between ES5 and YM2, which, yes, is more apparent then real. Right now I have a pair of Boolean tells indicating that we's gonna make a fresh low BUT because the Boolean is time-independent, I don't know when. What I do know is that when I get spurned at a RCL (in this case RCL does not = RTL) I don't stay long. lj
Followup on yesterday's anticipations. With one I made an error and used an RCL instead of an RTL, hence disregard. The other is still in play. One of the time frames that Jack suggests one pay attention to is the Weekly. Good idea. One should appreciate that when looking at Dailies and Weeklies, one is looking at CME-Globex data for the OHLC. This is rather critical and what is equally critical is that one appreciate what the exact start and end times are for the CME-Globex day. Briefly put, since I set my "NT Properties" times for start and finish to 4:15 PM ET (for the non-RFTH segment) it allows me to have a 1:1 correspondence with the widely reported and free data available on such sites as this one: http://futures.tradingcharts.com/. NT + ZF don't got no data for these time periods Draw some RTL's (and channels too) for the Weeklies for YM and ES and see what you think. As Chico Escuela might have said, "Victor and Jack been bery, bery good to me". lj