Been experimenting with Renko and Line Break bars. Seems interesting. Some of the same formations from the time based charts seem to hold, but the entries appear cleaner. Need more testing.
Frank, Trading well is taking one method and learn how to trade it, but jumping to a different indicator or other different approaches usually just wastes time and effort.
I use this system as your main system , picking trades in the direction of the main trend , to go with the flow. Keeps me out of the choppy markets http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?threadid=111305
For the 1 to 2 people here that really tried to help me, I thought I'd post an update. I'm still alive and have been working at this full time. Here's a quick summary of my activity: Joined a couple of rooms, spent thousands. Bought some indicators, spent thousands. It's hard to believe I've spent the last 2 years chasing my tail. I've been in sim and study mode, so besides my snake oil purchases, I haven't lost anything besides opportunity and 2 years of my life. Perhaps I'm a little wiser. One can hope. What I decided to do was some serious back testing. I picked a single signal, a single market, some consistent trading hours, defined some money management rules, and just started going backwards, filling up a spreadsheet. I've been recording the entry, exit by MM rules, MFE and MAE for every occurrence of the signal, regardless of the market condition or context. If the market was clearly going up and I got a signal to go short, I recorded it as a trade. It's very slow going, and I only have a few hundred trades recorded, but I've noticed something kind of exciting. Even though the strategy is only (so far) 52% profitable, it has averaged 17.4 ticks per day on 8.3 trades. The average MFE and MAE are such that I could increase my targets and tighten my stops to squeeze more out, but for now I'm going to continue recording the strategy as is. My goal is to accumulate 6 months of data, and this will take several weeks. After this, I hope to write a real trading plan and achieve mechanical proficiency in execution. One of the major problems I've had has been mixing in elements of discretion without any means of measuring whether or not my these tweaks to the plan helped or hurt. I recognize that this is advice I received a long time ago, and why I didn't take it then is beyond me. Just wanted to say thanks to the people that showed an interest in me, and let them know that their advice is finally being used, albeit a couple of years later.
Hi Frank, Good to see you still hanging in there. One of the areas you might want to concentrate more on is not %profitable, but losing %, what does it take not to lose. From this you can plan going to several areas. First is what is Price Action doing for you not to take signals? Too many huge ranging bars, bars too tight, is a EMA cutting through middle of bars. Time stops, what is average time in a winning trade, you want to try to capture 90% of these. Instead of going to just breakeven stop, at what point can you lock in one tick? Much of trading is acceptance. Some days I might have 20-30 trades of mainly one tick with a few of goal being met. Never fails how many times I get one tick and only to watch 20 seconds later price screams in desired direction, but that's ok, I didn't lose. And once you get losing % way down, then you can average down on all trades, so on a breakeven trade, the add-ons are existed where you had put on your original trade, so you can do well even when only making one tick.