nkhoi, what is meant by the light blue, light purple, and blue arrows on the pics you posted? Also it looks like you are using the study "N bar highest high n bar lowest low." How did you get them labeled like that and what value for N do you use? Looks like a pretty high number since in the first pic the top bar keeps going and in the second pic the top bar isn't even on the screen And the huge white down arrow in the first pic?
Great thread btw. As several have said remember it is about price action the squiggles are just to help those that have difficulty seeing PA. IronFist try and understand the underlying PA, re-read the first few pages. Seems to me you had two good shorts on your first chart right from the top that you did not mark.
I zip dll and studies collection so that you can see the same thing. In case you don't know studies col is saved with '-' this feature allows me to migrate this setup to other chart without wiping other setup out. DLL goes to sierrachart folder and 'slopes' collection goes to sierrachart/data folder. don't know why I said 100t maybe I wanted to see if you pay attn to the charts or not. it's 110t chart, sorry. the white arrow to point out the time of the entry, while both charts show the same entry level, yours is late by 3m I think. You would want to be the first one to see the slope changes not the last one.
I don't know what set of rules you used for your backtesting but if you are not following all of jjrvat's rules and guidelines, you are not testing his system. This is not a MA trading method. The MA's are supposed to aide you in seeing price action until you don't need them anymore. In your case, the MA's are not helping you, in fact, they are interfering with your ability to read the price action because you are relying on them too heavily. If you want to learn how to trade price action, the best advice I can give you is to take all the indicators off your charts and focus on price action. You only need to learn 1 winning setup to be a successful trader. Now let's look at the 1st chart you posted with the losing trade (reposted here for convenience). Based on price action, I would not have taken that trade. Why? It is a high risk trade. We are late in the trend (how do I know that?). What happens late in a trend? You should be expecting a significant correction (what does that mean?) or trend reversal. Whenever you have 3 or more waves in 1 direction without a significant correction, you are late in the trend. Significant correction means a complete retracement (or nearly so) of a wave. An exception, retracing a small wave is not so significant. What happened? Shortly after your losing trade, prices did retrace the entire last wave almost to the tick and then the down trend continued. Nobody knows in advance what prices will do. You should be looking to take entries with high probability of success and low risk. A retracement of a previous wave is a low risk, high probability set up for at least a tradeable bounce, in this case you could have gotten a lot more. You need to get your trading priorities straight and stopping worrying about missing big moves! Number 1 priority is Capital Preservation. Don't take high risk trades. The primary goal of trading is to make some profit, not catch big moves. Learn to take what the market gives you. Sometimes that will be 2 ticks, sometimes 20, sometimes 200. You cannot know in advance. Nobody knows in advance what prices are going do. Assume the worst and trade defensively. Do not let even a small profit turn into a loss. Price Action trading is discretionary, that means to be successful at it, you need to learn to interpret what current price action means. Bill
IronFist, iam not familiar with SierraChartâ¦.but if your platform can be programmed and you have some basic programming skills i donât see any problem of implementationâ¦let me know if you would be interested i could post the code that i use in EL⦠but as the previous post suggests you would be better served by reexamining jjvartâs unique trading approach before you get lost in the pool of indicatorsâ¦.cheers!
240 WMA (slow) 21 HMA (fast) Go long when slow MA is up and fast MA turns up if HHHL (PBP) pattern is present. Ignore long entries if PBP pattern is not present (so you don't go long when fast MA turns up after a lower low, for example). Entry is opening of first bar after slope changes. Exit is when the fast MA changes slope (so when it turns down while you're long). Exit is the opening of the first bar after the slope changes. Contrary to what people like to post on their charts, you cannot enter or exit on the first bar of a slope change because you don't know that the slope is changing until the bar closes. I've had bars reverse when the countdown timer says "1" remaining. Opposite for shorts. edit - Oh two more rules I forgot: 1. First trade is the first valid entry after 8:30 CST. Valid morning trades take into account yesterdays price action, so only go long in the morning if it's after 8:30CST and your chart is showing that this long entry signal is following HH and HLs from yesterday. 2. No entering new trades after 2:30pm CST (30 min before market closes) because the price does weird stuff then and there are tons of times when you'll lose money taking valid signals. It's ok to stay in a trade that was opened before 2:30pm CST until the exit signal, you just don't enter any new ones after that time. If you're still in a trade at 2:55pm CST (5 min before market close) you exit. Using those parameters, having set target profits of 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, and 15 ticks leads to negative expectancy. It lead to an increase in number of winning trades, however. But it's the occasional +40 or +100 or whatever tick trade that leads to positive expectancy. I read this thread a lot of times and the gist I got was "price moves in waves / enter after HHHL or LLLH when the price resumes its macro direction / use 240 WMA to determine macro direction and 21 HMA (or whatever fast MA) to determine wave movement" All my backtesting was done on YMM8 and YMU8 with 500 constant volume charts. Maybe I need to do that. I don't know how you know that. Because the trend has been going on "for a while?" I have had numerous consecutive +30 tick trades that all followed PBP (LLLH) that were "late in the trend." Or maybe they weren't. I remember being scared to enter because I thought the price had gone down so much already, but since they followed PBP setup I entered anyway and made a ton of ticks. edit - nevermind I see you explained "late in a trend" here: So not entering after the 3rd wave in a trend? Sounds like trading in the opposite direction of the macro trend. I've seen jjrvat post pics of this but I haven't actually tried that yet I never understood this "rule." On the second chart I posted I had to first incur a loss (20 tick drawdown) in order to make a profit. Had I "not let a profit turn into a loss" i would've exited that trade and not made anything on it. And doesn't that rule technically mean that as soon as a trade goes +1 tick in your favor you have to put a stop at breakeven? I don't know any instruments that trade slowly enough for that to work. The price flutters +/-2-4 ticks at all times on every instrument I've ever seen. Unless you get lucky during news it's impossible to never have a trade not ever show a temporary loss due to this "price flutter." Maybe I'm taking that too literally. I have difficulty with discretionary trading. I don't like "what ifs" and I don't like room being open for interpretation. It's too easy when you're wrong to go "oh, I interpreted that wrong," which is a cop-out and you learn nothing. In a 100% mechanical system, if you're wrong, it was just a statistical rarity, and if you're wrong often, the system needs tweaking to give better signals. There's no "oops I interpreted that wrong lol silly me maybe I'll do better next time."
I think Ironfist offers some legitimate questions and concerns it would be nice if Jrvat addressed some if not all of these issues for the sake of discussing his method. Daniel
I think I got it set up correctly. I don't see any horizontal lines for highs and lows like you had on your chart. Did you photoshop those in later? They look about the same Did you pick 110 arbitrarily or is there some significance to it? I never understood tick/volume/range number choices. I thought it was all about "picking one that looks good and gives you smooth, obvious waves for your instrument," but I see a lot of people are like "NO!!! You HAVE to use [insert number] because it's a fib/perfect/square/whatever!!!! You have to use 89 tick value charts!!! EIGHTY-NINE!!!!! 88 and 90 WILL NOT WORK!!! 89 is teh magic numb3r!!!!!!!!" Enlighten me please I'm gonna go study my charts using the studies you posted. Thanks. btw what's the difference between saving a group of studies with a "-" vs. without the "-"? You said you can migrate it to another chart without wiping the other study out... can't you do that anyway tho? edit - where did you get that MarketStructure.dll?? It seems different from the "Market Structure MSL/MSH" study that already exists in SC? btw thanks again!
you need kiwi7.dll many use 110t and it looks good to me. without '-' a new study will wipe out a old study, with '-' it will ask you do you want to keep the old study. they are diff study, you can use them both.