Thank you, vinc and Laissez Faire! To answer your questions vinc, I enter as soon as I see a break of support or resistance. The large time frames I use do not quite warrant waiting for a close as price may have advanced significantly by then. On a sidenote, I see that I have been drawn into a bad short position and could be stopped out by tomorrow. We are still primarily in a stable uptrend in the broader perspective, so looking for shorting opportunities will most likely result in little proceeds. Shorting below 1260 should be a more sensible proposition (if the ES ever gets there again). Nevertheless, attached is a snapshot of what I was seeing at the time of the trade. The reason why I started using Rainbow Moving Averages is because I wanted to easily distinguish minor pullbacks from a more severe turnaround. This time I failed to hold off and traded my old method by taking the first break of support. My take is that this tactic worked very well during prior months because the market was ranging. Now we are shifting into an uptrend so that breaks of minor support zones will not follow through. The RMA should help significantly in determining the path of least resistance from now on.
Daal, I haven't automated my strategy, and have no intention to do so at this moment. Unfortunately, I'm lacking the programming skills. But I did a backtest before going live and documenting my trades in this journal. Find the plot of altogether 73 trades (round turns) attached. This is all trading with 1 ES contract throughout the 2 year span. It resembles the performance I yielded so far here. The tactics are based on the printouts I made of 1H intraday charts, but most of all my philosophy about the battle of bulls and bears behind the price action (I seemingly can't link the direct post, it was posted on 10-05-11). A breakout is bought and the stop is trailed as the trend evolved until you are either stopped out or a breakdown of support occurred to reverse. The stop is then trailed again until the position is stopped out or reversed.
As expected, my short position was stopped out today for a loss of $775 (or 15.5 ES points). Total profit since beginning: $14,325
Wow!! If you keep adding contracts as your equity grows, you are talking about 7 figures account starting from an initial balance of 7k per contract in 2 years! Great performance. Man, you should go and backtest this thing by hand over the last 5 and then last 10 years - especially periods before 2008 to see what happens when vol was low. Edit: Alright, lets make it more conservative, even 10k per contract takes you to 7 figures in 2 years if the performance sustains.
Do you know of a good provider which offers intraday data of several years in the past? Something that is cost-effective I used the expired contracts still available in Interactive Brokers, but they don't date back infinitely. I remember eSignal does not offer sufficient historical data either.
I am mostly into forex. So, I can only tell you what I have heard - I am not an authority on data yet The best and the most authentic source I have heard is "tickdata.com". You should start a new thread and ask people for recommendations on best quality intra-day data for ES from its inception. https://store.tickdata.com/prices?productMarketId=PRODUCT_MARKET.FUTURES_INDICES Left table, row 3: For 1 contract, cost is 750$. IMO, You can't go wrong with that.
Ok but do you believe your rules are programmable or you think there are elements of intuition and discretion that can't be coded?
everything is very bullish. Are U waiting for braking of 1300 resistance line AND close above the line?