Price + Volume + Context Once you find how these three interplay, you'll need nothing else. Disclaimer being, it will most likely take you a ~ couple years to figure out how to put these pieces together on a consistent basis (iow, you need to experience 1000's of hours of live data). edit: I didn't fully realize that this was a backtesting thread. sorry if this is offtopic. Still feel like it was worth posting.
I'm not going to give you my manual for day trading the ES's, but I can tell one of my best trade set-up's involves the distance / difference between a fast ma and a slower ma. You might find better information looking at the difference in the ma's rather than a crossing of the ma's. Set the difference up as a histogram below price.
Well, there's no volume in forex lol. I agree context might be a good way to filter out losers. Like, for a moving average crossover system, it might be to eliminate the following signals (after a loss) if the price continues to trade in a flat trading range. BTW, the backtesting did show profits. And I figured I could always improve the results by scaling out and cutting losses at fixed points etc. It's just that I was looking for general ideas that could produce higher percentage winners. The thing is, MA crossovers can produce such large winners sometimes. It's kind of hard to ignore it but the percentage of winners isn't that impressive.
I'd like to thank those who suggested fading the signals, looking at support/resistence and using a trailing stop. I might investigate this as a brain exercise. The only thing I see that might be a problem is figuring out how to determine entry price lol.
Yeah, that's a good one for the stock market. But, I was thinking Forex. I can't tell when we'll have another rally but the last leg down seems like the same length of the last one plus the volume on the double leveraged SSO has gone higher. Imagine a sharp 1 month rally in this situation. whoa.
Use MACD on 2 time frames instead . There was a good thread by jahajee couple of months ago about trading MACD's