LOL - Sorry for the abbreviation, it means 7h a day, 5 days a week. Mo-Fr 9:15-4:15 is my personal active trading time for the US Market (from when I stop passively monitoring overnight Globex until just a minute before shutdown). I am, however situated in Western Australia, so my times are a little different - 12 hours. My trading starts at 9:15pm and goes till 4:15 am Regards, Scientist
Oops - Sorry Fast, I was just about to reply to yours. Hadn't been to ET for ages, plus I've got so muchPM, I don't know why. I just got notified that my inbox is full again! I will reply to you in a minute, priority is priority. I've been very busy getting right into quantitative analysis (which sounds unusual for a scalper but I'm amazed how powerful it is). I used to just trade, and write some logs. Now, I trade, and use very comprehensive spreadsheets everyday to record everything and do very in-depth statistics, not only of trades, magnitude, average and mean favorable and adverse excursions and sterling ratios, but also of the actual non-time-relative swings happening on the indexes intraday, which occur with staggering frequency... Also, I'm thinking about the development of a trading software, and I'm in the process of bugging eSignal with a few improvements, such as a DDE/RTD link for tape & depth, to import live data into Excel for quantitative analysis. They must give in. If they don't, I will threaten to change to a competitive proprietary vendor I always thought Excel was quite boring. Now that I got to know how powerful it really can be, everything has changed. Mr Clippit the sexy(?) paperclip man is getting more attention than my girlfriend Yeah yeah it is a funny world... Scientist.
..I am curious, if it isn't proprietary, to know what statistics you are generating on prices. I ask because my methods are effectively statistical, although I don't explicitly go through statistical analyses. Thanks. - Mike
Hi hyp, Well it isn't really proprietary - But it requires a lot of work and research to do, so I'd suggest you do it yourself, since this way you'll make a lot more discoveries, too. To give you a (nice) hint: Have a look at the directional short-term swings on ES. Use a 15s or 30s chart to do this. What do you see? You will notice that, depending on the time of day, most moves on ES will tend to go 5-9, generally around 6-7T into one direction, and then reverse or at least retrace again into the other! Knowing this, you can for example enter a fade every time your average swing range has been travelled (let's say 6T), and chances are at least much higher that the trade moves into your direction or at least not against you too much too easily! This way, you can also drastically reduce your stops! I often use 3-4T 'stops' on the ES or NQ. This is a lot of research done for you, hypostomus, but I'd strongly suggest that you do the study yourself and get to know Excel well. Count the swings on the 15s or 30s charts for, whatever, 20 days, and input them into your spreadsheets (of course into different timebrackets!) - Play around, and then do some number crunching! Yes, it's a lot of work - But it's extremely powerful. Unless you knacker it, you won't get anywhere anyway. Do the analyses and do your discoveries, it's not hard to do and has unlimited upside potential. The point in what I just explained is that you're counting the price-swings only, regardless of time, which you cannot do with normal bar charts, you need to do it manually. You can of course use PNF charts, but then you're missing the learning point and it's not as clear in a way if you want to experiment parameters. Good Luck - I know you won't need it! Anyway, I'm outta here! Best Regards, Scientist.
...say no more, you already said too much, it won't work any more now, please delete your post before it's too late. I do something similar, which I think of as determining "path statistics". If it does "this", should I go with it? Fade it? Since it did "that" (conditioning the future on the past), and if it now does "this", should I flow or fade? It can all get very confused and Harry-ish (that's a new word making its way into the vernacular now thanks to ET) after a while with multiple levels of conditioning. My approach is "MY computer knows what YOUR computer's gonna do, nyah, nyah!". I smell hedge fund here. You got any money? I can chip in 2 cars. I have four opening systems working on these principles. Played all togehter, they manage not to lose more money than I can afford. You automating your calls?
Nono, no mechanical stuff. As soon as you go mechanical, you're giving away about 80% of your profit potential, not to mention increase risk due to latency. The point lies in the pure cerebral processing power of your brain, which is by far superior to anything a computer could ever do. It will be a long, long time until a computer can evaluate, process and act on the subtle nuances of order flow etc which a good discretionary trader can easily recognize. Not to even mention the task of programming it to do so!!! Regarding your 2-car offer - Thanks a lot, but yes I have enough money and I'm not taking anything into management in the moment - LOL You won't need me, anyway. Trading is easy enough to do by yourself. You only need to make a few fundamental realizations. Such as that you don't need indicators, that price and volume is all you need, that simplicity is the best way of keeping the mind clear and reading the market in an unbiased way. Eventually you'll realize that it goes even simpler than that. You will realize that the real problem is not your technology or knowledge, but solely your own psychology. Trading is not fancy, it's been done for the last 1.5 million years or so, ever since the first hairy man stood upright and bid 4, then 5, then 6 fishes for a rabbit. Rabbit-man hit the bid at 6, Fish-man was happy and the deal was done. Day trading was born. Fuck technology, trading systems and adaptive moving averages. it's all fancy, but makes little difference in this business. It's still just about buying and selling. It's your mind that makes all the difference, your attitude, and your virtue in managing fear, greed and directional bias. If you can eliminate all of these, you will be the best trader in the world... Good Luck. Scientist.
Fascinating thread. I watch t&s throughout the day but have been focusing primarily on pace. I will definitely start to pay more attention to these other factors. Thank you.
There are several ways to use the data that are helpful. Like anything, you can get a great deal out of the correlations of independent data sets. I pay maximal attention to your list and even arrange it so eye movement is out of the picture. AMT4SAWA really showed an integrated manner of using the T&S. With market depth also available (notwithstanding the way it cripples some), I find it all especially useful. I see three trading issues that may be influenced individually and sometimes in pairs: 1.eliminateing acting on anitcipated trends that don't happen. 2. not acting on definite sgnals, 3. noise trading topics. 4. the combination of 1 and 3. This is a killer. It is a sotoried sequence. expressions like "I just knew it ws going to happen>>action is taken>>> it doesn't happen>>> the market goes against the action>>>>> the person freeses>>>> more and more losses accumulate. 2. "sets the person up" (the opposite of a market set up. Then the person is dealing with failure and all the failure pictures go to work on him. While in this state, 2. piles on in the pictures. People see several times their gains fade. If a person does 1>>2, then 1>>>2, then 1>>2, it gets really tough to shape up to trade again. T&S 101 is a real cure for a lot of this stuff, especially with the Market Depth. Trusting any indicators is a tough job. Using them seamlessly and continually will really work if you get the drill down. do this by understanding thoroughly and properly integrating sets of signals. single impacting signals are rotten for trading well. T&S has lots of integrative aspects. It is the "people pictre" of the market.