I was reading a lot of threads here where people are asking others to call trades real time. It is not about calling trades. It is about trading with probabilities and managing positions after you are in one. Imagine asking Peyton Manning to throw a TD on the very next play during a football game. If he missed, that makes him a lousy QB? That is ridiculous. Instead, you let him manage the game and win the game over the next 35 to 50 plays. And what makes a good QB also makes a good trader in the ability to manage the game and have probabilities in your favor. Not the ability to call the next trade out or next rally in the market.
In our trading room, the learning dynamic causes us to share the whole trading process by having a division of responsibility among members. Granted, as learners emerge as fully equipped traders they can do all the separate jobs in combination. In the interim, we also rotate and some screens have two mice for annotating. (separate brains for each mouse and not in the ambidextrous sense) We use the football concept of making first downs. X points is a yard and to double has a point value too. A first down in a week is a doubling in that week. Back to your topic of making calls. Each sector of rresponsibility on our team is "making calls" regarding her/his responsibility. This is a conscious effort that promotes the idea that the responsibility spheres can have "concurrent signals" from differing specialized indicator flow. The last Friday, Monday and Thursday (today) and in that order, had narrow ranges on ES. This proved to the team just what areas of responsibility provided insight in these narrow alleys. So for us "making calls" is always in the space since almost all market time is devoted to "continuation" of trends. We only do Hold/reversal trading. We hold between the taking of extreme profit segments. If a long profit segment is taken, then a short is beginning to be held. We make enough yardage to deal primarily with the ATR as a performance indicator of gaining yardage. A week is so long that getting a first down is not usually a Friday activity. you do entry/exit trading by first making a bet on something you have seen enough to bet upon. mostly you keep sidelined as the market moves from your exit to a distant "management strategy" set up worth "hoping" has a positive expectancy for this specific gut wrenching hold to the "anagement max pain level. For you management is pain management if and when you have a positioned bet. So to back up, "making a call" is a mangement call on past occurring positive expectancy type entries. "making a call" allows observers to see how management of pain is done after "making a call". "Making a call" is a prediction. Acting upon the pasage of time fter a position is on is manageing. What out tean does is have many look up tables and flow sheets. they cover ALL possibilities. This means that a reversal is the trading tool of choice. we are always in the market since taking a full profit segment is followed, concurrently, by beginning a profit segment. we have one team item that allows use to stay long on a short signal. It is this: The extreme of the next trade back to long is 3 ticks or less. In bar to bar language this means we have a worker who keeps his eye on this ball in a specific manner (no descretion). we have found trading costs are trivial. And we also feel the mental sweat of keeping a biased orientation is sort of tested when what CW calls "overtrading" would be occurring. we avoid "overtrading" because it is a mental hazard. I notice Peyton does have real voices calling his touchdowns. Thank god we only deal with getting first downs (doubling) on our team. striving for first downs is a good idea and, to that end, we have learned to speak only when we have substantive input to get that yardage. It is refreshing and reinforcing. Our three favs are : carve, BO (of rtl or BM) and Wall for turns. Most of the time is between turns. All work is logged and annotated. We do it in the near future just ahead of the Present. Then we see the future come into the Present later on the big wall screen. Growth in trading, for our team, is found in the details. We have little notebooks called journals. Periodically, the journals are rewritten as sets of notes for exchanging. Note names get put into indexes of our documentation (page numbers are found by rereading) and glossary terms are expanded and deepened and itnerrelated. this is mostly orientated to the "continuation" part of making money during hold. today we has a bar 78 "advance one peak. this meant there was "NO T1". On bar 80 there was going to be an "all F's" on the log for most of the bar. For our annotator this deserved a journal note to get that the "next" would be T2P. He took a snagit of volume and price to complement his journal note and others asked for copies. we all saw the market go short on the bar ultimately and that meant the open ws a non dom entry where the second trade would be Dominant going long. The CW is looking a gap retraces ...lol...
It is an interesting post you have. But not exactly easy for me to comprehend or fully understand the details. Seems like a little general. Can you maybe post a screen shot of a market with an example of which you speak? Thank you,
Trading is about execution! A successful trader has unshakable belief in their system and trade management thus they can execute as needed. Even if such a trader called out trades it won't work for others as brilliantly because they may not have the necessary confidence, skills, account size etc.. Unless you take a system and make it yours even the best systems will not work! I laugh every time I read why don't so and so trader call out trades. Concentrate on developing your skill set instead of being in another's slipstream.
Give yourself a treat. Draw a market cycle of a long and short trade. Match the independent variable moves to the dependent variable you have drawn. I believe you will draw using the conventional axes. Now attach bars to each pane's drawing. Imagine 56 years passing where you have spent the time doing anything you wish. This note maybe understandable.
Here is a snagit taken by our annotator late on the 22nd. The purpose of the snagit was for him to add an example to his collection of End Effects of trade profit segments. Here you see a hold for several (7) bars (BO T1 to Aa HVBO). He took a pic of the independent variable and the sequence of volume bar names that occurred during the profit segment hold period. The names come from unique math expressions as part of a complete set. The End Effect of the trend segment was in the A band (See cap A) and it was item "a" of the End Effects that could happen in the A band (a through h, without an i). We use a 20 point accumulation per contract for doubling capital in the market.. A week is the duration we use to perform a doubling as a goal. The trade shown is a short hold from approximately 53 to 49 (ES contract) on the 22nd pm. You can count the 5 minute bars in the pic he snagged 4/20 is a reasonable profit decimal percentage of 1.0 a doubling. There are 405 bars in a week. So 7/405 is the decimal percentage of 1.0 for a week. As you see, our team is rapidly closing in on our weekly goal with this example. We always have a call in advance of our reversal. We use lock-in to assure knowing in advance. Doing a reversal locks-in a profit segment and begins a new profit segment. Our management is not evident in any way. We go in on the open and trade until the day margin ends. We do not use all our capital because we feel there must be a reserve for bar volatility (94% is always in the market less intraday pofits that are not available until settlement after hours). This is a policy and not, in our opinion, a managemet function. I guess my posts are too general and not specific as you say. Others add that I am also misleading for various reasons. One aspect of hold/reversal trading is the factor of calling the turns properly. I notice a lot of people catually are betting when they trade. Betting on reversal turns may be incomprehensible to them. Some traders do regression; they must see trends in an unusual manner. regression may actually prevent such a person from being in the market all of the time. I notice hedge funds use regression AND they stay in the market all of the time (I know they rotate capital as well).
Does that software auto draw all that or are you drawing all that by hand? There are a lot of things on that chart.