Friday / April 03, 2020 / 2:00 AM PST I was using the blue moving average as a short-term baseline on my one-minute chart configuration, but discovered it was too susceptible to rate fluctuations to accurately convey the direction in which price was genuinely headed. I therefore replaced it with the orchid moving average, which did a better job of filling the role. I found a second indicator that was close, but did not produce as “clean” a line. I plotted it on the chart anyway so that the duo could sort of provide me with a “consensus” opinion, which I turned into a triple cluster by inserting the average of the two. These tools will become more profitable once I am free to monitor my positions and therefore able to remain in them until I get an exit signal in the form of candlesticks beginning to paint on the reverse side of the blue moving average... It should also help me keep my losses to no more than a dozen or so pennies.
Wednesday / April 8, 2020 All of my chart configurations seem to have at long last arrived at a final resting place. If what I believe to be true is the reality of the situation and I could indeed make money consistently trading binary options if I were to give it a try, this would further validate the efficacy of trading Numerical Price Prediction with a focus on baselines, cycles and envelopes. Just playing around for now, but hopefully I can begin trading "for real" by the end of this month, at which time I should be finished with the project I'm working on for someone else with enough excess cash to resume what I started (and stopped) just before Christmas... Believing there is little, if anything, that is left purely to chance by the sovereign Deity, I've wondered what was the purpose of spending four years in the United Arab Emirates only to see my desire to have an impact within the realm in which I was operating come to nothing. But had I not left the (heavily regulated) United States of America, I would have never had the freedom to explore all the available options with respect to trading financial instruments, without which I seriously doubt I would have developed what has enabled me to arrive where I now find myself as a day trader. So perhaps it is this that was the main purpose for my stint in the UAE.
Me thinks that today, Monday, April 20, 2020, be the end for me with all this "jabbering" as it were. It's time to stop talking about it and start "being" about it, as the couple says on the silly census commercial I keep seeing on television when I watch the local evening news. I haven't tested my "final" configuration yet, other than what I learned from my last seven trades, but my one- and five-minute charts strike me as being better than they were before, plus the modifications I made were the culmination of insights stemming from my last configurations, which were already working well, so it's hard for me to imagine that what I now have will turn out to be unreliable and/or invalid. (Motivation for the modifications came from a perceived need to better fit the last round of revisions to the moment-by-moment extremely hands-on style of trading I began transitioning to last week.) So, I've begun to turn my focus elsewhere, to things like memorizing Scripture, designing animation characters, writing educational curriculum, and creating sugarless deserts. Hopefully, going forward, trading will pretty much take care of itself.
Thursday, April 23, 2020 For the longest time I’ve viewed the steepness of a moving average’s slope as what I conceptualize as “momentum.” Unfortunately, I’ve always had to “eyeball” this, because I could never find a slope indicator. I also couldn’t code one myself because, while price = y (the rise) I could not conceive of a way to represent x (the run) in a way that could be applied in the exact same manner to yen pairs and non-yen pairs alike. I thought rate of change (ROC) might be a satisfactory substitute, but unfortunately, in actual practice I never found this to be so. Nonetheless, my desire for an objective means of quantifying momentum as slope never left me, and with a fresh spark rekindling this desire—believing that entering trades coming out of pullbacks when there is strong momentum and pocketing gains as the subsequent surges fizzle out—I thought again today about how I might quantify slope and…surprise, surprise…figured out an extremely simple way to represent the run that can be applied to yen and non-yen pairs alike. Lower Panel Slope Indicator I will be curious to see what happens if I buy only when the slope oscillator occupies the (yellow) green zone and sell only when it occupies the red (i.e., pink) zone.
Sunday / April 26, 2020 Figuring out how to create an indicator that measures slope for me has now also enabled me to code a chop zone indicator to let me know when to stay out of the market, pictured in the lowest panel below...
Thursday / April 30, 2020 / 7:15 AM PST The lesson to learn from this loss (in your Tickmill demo account, not your OANDA live account) is that even if there appears to be a significant amount of momentum pushing/steering overall price action in a particular direction, it is still probably a good idea to, if at all possible, avoid executing trades when rates are positioned on the "near side" of the corresponding lower-time-frame envelopes, waves or cycles. Instead, try to force yourself to wait until price is located at the "far side" of the associated price range, even if it means missing out on the occasional opportunity when candlesticks break through "statistical" support or resistance.
May 5, 2020 Note that it was on this Tuesday (though actually it happened yesterday, on Monday) that you felt you had finally arrived at your ultimate destination—at least for this phase of your trading journey. There is nothing left to do with your trading system at this point other than trade it. The development stage is essentially over. This morning's activity confirmed however the necessity of managing your positions moment-by-moment. For example, the EURAUD trade got three-quarters of the way to your take-profit target in two minutes when it started to waver, prompting you to immediately adjust where you'd set it. So, you realized a return in three minutes, whereas if you hadn't traded in this manner, you might have had to wait around for three hours, or possibly have even witnessed the pair reverse direction and stop you out. Similarly, you adjusted your take-profit target to pocket your gains from CADJPY when it began to waver at statistical resistance, and then watched it subsequently reverse direction and establish a trajectory in the opposite direction. So then, you need to be nimble and alert. If you can manage this, it's possible you can meet your goals for the day in an hour or less of trading, which you would much rather do than find yourself sitting around half the day staring at your computer monitor. But as for the charts themselves, they are providing you with accurate and honest assessments of what is happening with each pair so you can interpret price action accordingly. (By the way, it is time to begin considering upping your trade size to 0.02.)
Tuesday-Wednesday / May 5-6, 2020 / 4:37 AM PST My performance from trades 11 through 20 was unacceptable. I will need to try to improve on this. This newly imagined lower-panel indicator just might prove very helpful in pinpointing optimal entry levels.
This comment is no longer merely theoretical for me. These three oscillators really did turn out to be quite practical in terms of identify great entry levels, especially with the addition of a fourth that was not included when I posted that image in my last entry.