In the process of automating my own brain reasoning, I have to explain to the programmer how my neurons functions when taking decision. The problem is that this kind of guy only of course understands hard-techno-speak and not trading speak. If I use UML/XML to do so I would lose a lot of time and it would be less readable humanly speaking so I decided to create a kind of "journal dialect" that could be processed automatically by the programmer and by this way I can control that he doesn't misunderstand me - everybody knows the difficulty lies there between a user and a programmer . This allows me to make rapid annotation that are formalised enough so as to be easily processed. At the same time I can reread my journal which has the advantage of being very detailed without being too verbose. The picture below gives an example: each word is separated by parenthesis, the flow of speech stays natural for a human and so easy to remember and readable. <IMG SRC=http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/attachment.php?s=&postid=466874>
An other idea to increase productivity when filling the journal: although the dialect is easy to remember writing it by hand is cumbersome if I want a very detailed journal. But since each phrase is stereotyped, it's easy to create a template snippet only once (one for each type of phrase) and just fill necessary variables that the programmer will then process automatically to generate the journal. For example (for yesterday local top at 10509.11): I would have filled the values 10508.5, 10509.11 etc ... after the keywords #define [_some_pre-stereotyped_name_var_] #define _Theo_Local_Top_ 10508.5 #define _Real_Local_Top_ 10509.11 #define _Error_ (plus)(0.61) #define _time_begin_ 09:52 #define _time_end_ 10:14 which will fill this remplate snippet (HHAO= Highest High After Opening) : ||_month_|||_day_|||_year_|||_time_end_|(d+1)||_time_begin_|(d+1)||HHAO|<font color="black">HHAO(|_Real_Local_Top_|)(realised)(BRK)(P1FS2)(MxPFS2)(Local1)(|_Real_Local_Top_|)|_Error_|</font>| Once filled by the program it will give 10:14(d+1) HHAO(10509.11)(realised)(BRK)(P1FS2)(MxPFS2)(Local1)(10508.5)(plus)(0.61) Of course it can pushed even further since the variables themselve can be get filled automatically but I like keeping doing things by hand because it help me memorise better market's patterns.
Now the best thing of this: it is not only a process to solve automation problem which does concern the programmer and not really the trader, but as for the trader, by creating such templates it obliges in fact to factorise all the same kind of patterns of market by detecting commonalities and refining by differential details using an iterative process thinking. Instead of creating adhoc and arbitrary patterns you are basing the creation of patterns more objectively and accurately from the journal (This is somehow equivalent to the methodology of Use Cases introduced in software engineering whereas before everything was conceived from pure abstraction instead of considering real facts from real user cases and so the result was often inadequate).
I have now LOD, HOD and HH and LL now recorded automatically so that I could do the same histogram than found in Lequeux Article Timing the High and Low http://www.btinternet.com/~emmanuel.acar/hl.pdf <IMG SRC=http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/attachment.php?s=&postid=472883> Nevertheless it's rather useless in my trading framework: if I need to register the time of high and low it's because as I know the price this can later provide me a more exact time as I have also a theorical time but didn't study the correlation between the theorical time and the physical time. So at the moment I know only approximately that is to say if the high will be made before the low or conversely. I also record intermediate highs and lows for calculating the precision of break zone (example with red ellipse below). For people who can't program the stuff I could put a simple database query engine that can extract all stats on the time criteria. It will be for the next site: as I said I'm going to retire my model from the current site as I don't want to offer it any more to the public so I will substitute the current contents by a mere portal ... of my financial bookmarks in fact . I can add such kind of statistics also (cleaned from specific datas of my model of course). <IMG SRC=http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/attachment.php?s=&postid=474970>