"Efficacy times frequency" is a nice notion. Sorry I misstated what you do as trading the "working dominant fractal". They may mean the same thing. Reversals and retraces are differentiated immediately upon the beginning of each. As RN says he uses his eyes and see trends. Maybe he can differentiate, at the beginning, whether a move within a trend is a retrace or a reversal. A person seeing trends can tell whether a move is a reversal or a retrace immediately since they happen at different times in trends and alway happen in the same relative order. Some people who trade trends go in at the begining of the trend; others go in at the end of a retrace within a trend and take the trend to its dominant endpoint. Your explaining the difference in your performance between retraces an reversals is telling. Since it is not possible for you to look at volume to see both major dimensions of the market, then maybe you may be able to consider the market pace (volume) and volatility and bar overlap correlation to volume and then have an indirect measure of the leading indicator of price. Early in the thread on "ideas and verifying them", the conversation turned to volatility. I interjected the market pace/volatility matrix for consideration. The vertical and horizontal distributions of each variable (other dimension held constant) are Gaussian distributions. Bar volatility and bar to bar overlap are both "naturally" distributed so they are very powerful 'tells" from the market. If you measured your anxiety (use a EMwave pc meter) you would have proof of your current viewpoint. you do mix up retraces and reversals as you explained. at the beginning of your "indended trade", volatility is declining and overlap is increasing. This for the PA oriented person is a tough hols. You don'r as a rule. Waht comes next for retrace lets you get stopped out. what comes next for a reversal is the money making that is 6 times bigger on your equity curve and your personal emotions do not let you get there because of the volatility and overlap symptoms you "percieve". It is the combination of what you "see" visually and your "inference" of failures from your long term memory that end the trade with you exiting as a behavioral action. I made the pitch to you about "changing your mind". You are going to be unable to do the drills to overcome your present inference. I brought this up before with my example of Talontrading's steadfastness to not think. If he thought, he would have to "change his mind" by veryifiing answers to questions that are different than the answers he now uses for "survival". Most people would rather use survival tactics than "change their minds" Your trading plan works for reversals and not for retraces where you get stopped out. Unfortunately, you mind takes you out of reversals before they end (by a factor of 6). Since you won't use volume to get away from PA trading, use volatility and bar overlap. Allow the pennant of the beginning of the reversal to occur (FTP for ending a short dominant working fractal or a FBP for ending a long dominant working fractal). Most will see the counterintuitive nature of these formations (they occur in a counterintuitive context). If mentally you get as fat as the increased bar volatility and the decreased bar overlap on BO of the formation, then you can "change your mind's" present first recourse to a new correct first recourse. none of this will probably happen for you. most people can't get past the counterintuitive nature of markets. Counterintuitive means markets are different than non market "percieving".
Analyzing stuff is done for either use on a trading platform or as part of MADA the trader's routine for getting to the trading plaform occasionally. I do not want to divert this thread away from the OP's strong attempt at correcting his concerns. Getting the facts on bar volatility and bar overlap is best done using a lookup table which is updated regularly. A sufficient approach is to use approximately 1600 bars and update each bar by doing a delete, then add. The lookup then functions in a Boolean manner depending upon the shell of the ATS that is being used to extract the market's offer. Manually, it just sinks in to your mind. Here, the OP uses tight stops and a short emotional fuse based upon anxiety. Volatility and overlap replace these two for given shells of sensitivity, meaning efficiency of extraction which the OP refers to as a product of efficacy and frequency. Think of a core and shells. In putting a paradigm to use, the core is the foundation that handles the degrees of freedom of information supplied. Expanding outward shell by shell is like the OP focussing on the "fastest.......to get.....the dominant ......." except for the efficiency and effectiveness considerations. Shells' logic take inputs from the core or adjacent inner shell; outputs go to larger more outer shells. This is a drilling down from the general to the specific and is NOT inductive like finding edges, etc. Drilling down is done in a context of logical critical thinking where degrees of freedom are added to add precision level by level, all deductively. To trade, a platform is involved and executing and excution are prioriies. The MADA core and shells, siphon off pertinent collections of elements to form sets that go from M to A to D to A. The sort to get pertinence is more important than all of the shell's degrees. There is one more more important facet: assuring barriers I will not address this further; it involves a lot of reasoning. Volatility and overlap play roles in timing, gating and assuring barriers. The OP has no control over his "inference" (long term memory) so his trades after starting, get hijacked. He will not any longer look at the leading market variable of price. I did a workaround with volatility and overlap. I have the "tables" to do it. They are records in a given shell that is out from the core HS and PM's. These degrees of freedom are selectively engaged as elements of data sets chosen for their efficacy and limited in frequency to always BE the "sweet spot" of the Present offer. So volatility and overlap is "analyzed" and it is stored and maintained. When used, it is used in "like kind" with the system design constaints: Boolean vectors. A Boolean vector is a time rate of change comparison that has a form like "increasing" or "decreasing". Volatility is increasing for example. Overlap is decreasing, for example. I DID use those words to support the interests of the OP. The CW demands edges derived from induction. This is beating a dead horse. To one significant figure, in ES 1 point is 3% of margin. To make 20% a year a person does 7, 1 point net trades or 1, 7 net point trade. As a person shifts from 2 trades a day to 40 trades a day, the efficacy and frequency change roles in their product. The abstract idea of a core and shells to attain precision in extracting the offer is roughly foreign in the CW of the financial industry. Putting volatility and overlap to work to increase the "take" is uncommon. One simple way is to log within the five minute ES bars. I log within the 2 minute bars of YM, concurrently. I log 10 other things too. My mind has this finite set's combinations placed in an order like the scale in music. Six of the 9 cases deal with equal or decreasing volatility; all are 100% overlap. The other three are where money is made: OB, XB or XR and ST R or ST B. In these three, overlap can be put into five classes, each having their own portent. There is a person I trigger to post more than once every day. He says one thing only. It is negative. He does not know that the mind drops the negative and creates a picture of the opposite of the negative. As he says he knows about NLP this is a refutation of his daily negative posts. Who reading this is going to examine the nine cases. Who is going to review the six that don't and the three that do (have 100% overlap). ALL OCD's here in ET are going to. What will happen to the OP's mind if he regards the cases and the extent of the overlap; he will have a beginning of a new first recourse begin to happen. What if he "SEES" that the other three TELL him which side of the market is the right side? Then he can override his current emotional failure. Look at edge selection and trading. This inductive process is probaility based instead of go/nogo based. What is the forte of chopsing go/ no go? It is in chosing a measure that is NOT a value but is a vector instead. To use volatility and overlap it must be done in a vector (comparitive) context. Are the people who can't understand what I write dumb? Probably not. My failure to communicate is said to be because I cannot write well or in plain English. See talontrading's instructions to me on writing corectly to him. It turns out I am talking about things that are uncommonly addressed. The greatest author (just ask him) on trend following thinks the pattern is gibberish. It is to him and it is different to me. To me the fact that 1 point is 3% of margin means that the exponent of the compound interst formula is the more important consideration. I have just suggested to the OP that he trade 40 times a day and use volatility and overlap since he will not use the leading indicator of price. What happens to capital if it is used to take the market's offer continually by staying on the right side of the market? How about going down to a fast fractal called the OTR chart, the DOM (level II) and the Stretch/Squeeze. My post on this was deleted......LOL..... I guess it was poorly written...... My hope is that people DO look at volatility and overlap. Want to see something? sym>>> FTP>>>>XB. sym>> FTP>>>hitch>>>>ST R. sym>>>FTP>>>>>hitch>>>ST R>>>>>OB B. Lets add some strings of bars with semi colons: sym>>> FTP>>>>XB; sym>>> FTP>>>XB; FTP>>>XB; XB: XB; FTP. sym>> FTP>>>hitch>>>>ST R; FBP>>XR; XR. sym>>>FTP>>>>>hitch>>>ST R>>>>>OB B; FTP>>>XB. It must be gibberish cause I wrote it. What would it be like if all conventional formations were written in terms of Boolean vectors? I know, easy to program as inductive back testing.....LOL....
Time to keep it real (for me) Jack, Youâve posted about me twice in this thread, and complimented me both times... For me to ignore this would be dishonest of me⦠There is much I disagree with regarding your approach to, and description of â tradingâ¦. but I hold no animosity against you personally Thank You Kindly Sir RN