I find it interesting that you were able to chat on skype for ages and yet you know nothing about what he is doing and how. What the heck were you talking about all that time? LOL Its like for the religious people getting to meet the pope and have tea, and yet forgetting to ask him to bless you and your family! haha I think guys who have inside info still need some basic trading skills. I mean shorting at the end of the day when you know a bad report is coming out and hence will lead to a huge gap down opening is one thing, but even many news reports often leave price going down, even if the report is good, or result in price going up, even if the report is bad, depending on how good or bad the investors were expecting. So if these calls were more intraday stuff versus long term holding or not just trading around major news releases, then I'd say he must absolutely know what he is doing.
Seems like he would've dropped some hints during your conversations. For example, is he trading trends or mean-reversions? Is he a pure PA guy or does he use indicators? One question you can ask without making him think you're just a poacher is "If I wanted to learn to trade like you do, what books do you recommend I read?" That way you come across as somebody who is willing to do the hard work of learning to trade. Good luck.
LOL, Don't you tihnk I didn't ask how he does it?! It was just a small skype with 2 losers (me and someone else) and this guy. There wasn't much 'chatting' once it was clear he wasn't gonna give his secrets away. but he just called 1-3 trades a day. Nearly always got at least 5 points per trade with 1-2 point stops.
The original question on the thread "did sla ever work" is the same thing as saying "did buying low and selling high ever work" ? It's truly that vague and useless. surf
I have a folder on my PC of his trades.Every time he called a trade, I took a screenshot! Lots and lots of his trades were calling the exact bottom or top of a move. He mentioned the odd TA concept at times, but he often spoke of charts/TA etc making up a TINY part of his method/reason for entry
I think asking general questions is a waste of time. There are a shit load of traders using indicators and mathematical models who have made it work. There are also a shit load of traders using purely price action with nothing else. Within this group you have many who only trade trend, many who perhaps look for reversal and fade everything, and much of this can be combined if their basis is mean reversion. So in my opinion, getting generalizations is a complete waste of time because everything works in my opinion, and everything also doesn't work. It all depends on how its applied.
This to me, along with saying he went for 5 point targets and 1-2 point losses provides lots of info. I'm not sure if you're talking ES or NQ, given that 1 ES point is more of a move than 1 NQ point, but either way, if he catching the exact tops or bottoms, he must be looking at the DOM or T&S. He must be using very fast charts, perhaps not even charts at all, and just looking to ride the wave.
Silly comparison. SLA is proposed as a trading strategy, specifically a trend trading strategy. Nothing vague or useless about asking whether a trading strategy works. BLASH is a metastrategy that describes so-called counter-trend trading, i.e., attempts to call tops and bottoms so traders can exploit trend reversals. Getting back to your comparison, BLASH obviously works. The trick is actually pulling it off. But the majority opinion in this thread is that SLA doesn't work.
Got it... so that means its not as tight as I first thought if it was NQ, but 5 ES points is still a tight range. The next thing I'd be curious about would be at exactly when we got into a trade. If lets say his entry was a short for 2000, did this get filled as price was coming up, hence he might have already had a limit order to go short expecting a turn, or did price already hang out at 2000 for a while, and hence he called a short because there was hesitation. Or perhaps it got to 2002, and he saw the down move and got into a short as price was coming down. This would be interesting. Once again, there are trades I'm sure who are trading it each of the different ways I describe and each makes it work, so this doesn't tell us much, but it would at least give me an idea of what he is doing if I so wanted to analyze his MO further.