How do you find your signals?

Neet · Jan 1, 2007

whitster,

certainly you must use pivots ?

whitster · Jan 1, 2007

i do use pivots. i should have said... "i use no LAGGING indicators" intraday

pivots aren't really "indicators" anyways. they are key reference points.

Atlantic · Jan 4, 2007

Quote from jack hershey:

"How do you find your signals?" is a neat topic.

Your OP, the next post and you second post tie together, neatly, a common problem in finding signals.

So you, freewilly, schaefer and the OP of SPM, have a common well described situation with signals. Read carefully what is going on and, in particular ,how much it is costing.

Giving up profits is not something anyone wants to do and it is unfortunate to have frustrations in not being able to get a cure with signal selection.

In SPM it is not going to be possible to "find" a good signal. Secondly, during certain market conditions there are no signals possible from SPM.

In another thread the SPM OP is running, there is discussion and in it the mentioned that SPM has an adjunct like "tape reading" but more akin to "order flow" to get additional signals to make SPM more workable, especial during particular times when the SPM signals are not functional.

"How do you find your signals?" is still a good topic. It is an excellent topic that is rarely considered by persons running records of their performance in ET. This is a major missing theme of ET. Look at another long thread to see how B1S2 used a method for quite a while to examine its performance. He demurred after about 1000 pages and went back to a prior different method. An iterative refinement of the initial method was never undertaken by B1S2, unfortunately.

The "what if" part of "How do you find your signals?" comes up primarily as an iteratve refinement of the basic premises of a system that has been designed.

You have a system and you want (need) it to work as best it can.

It is best to give the system some exercise before you dump it outright.

What is learned is the possible range of adjustment and the limits of the range of adjustments ... effectiveness.

At the end of this you know better how to go about redesigning a new approach.

By doing this for say 10 ,20 , 30 or 40 years, it is possible to get a lot on the table. Go or it. Personnally, I enjoy following about a dozen contemporary methods in ET and looking at their spectrum of performance and their limitations and most of all, the best tweak that can be nmade to "fix" the contemporary system. Sometimes a fix can shift the method to a greater effectiveness than it's next competitor.

I looked at a chart posted by a person who rarely posts charts in his criticisms and it was a real eye opener. He simply was not looking at the market in the first place and was proferring suggests that were foreign in nature.

"How do you find your signals?"

You have to be in the ballpark first. Then you can "look" for signals.

To look for signals it is best to know hands down the intention and purpose of the thing that provides signals and it's scope and bounds for providing signals.

You have to cross the line from continuous functions to statistical mechanics that "ghost" or replicate continuous functons.

None of the examples given above have done either of these two things for the respective ballparks represented.

People say trading is ___________ and they say the learning curve is ____________. Neither of these things have to be the "truth of the matter"; they are just, in fact, personal reflections of the practioner's rocky road. This, as caused by their mental processes to get into the ball bark and then fail to "work" on iterative refinement. The lazy person is excepted from this conversation.

Why don't people understand what they are working with? Usually they have not examined the equations at work sufficiently. They mostly focus on the output of the equations as a continuing value (they are not looking at a continuing signal).

What if the persons cited above were to look at the equations and then look at the output of the equations as a continuous signal?

The common result, coincidentally is the same for all above mentined. And it is the most common cause of failure to make money as a result.

You will see what I mean as you make this effort. So that is the first part of "How do you find your signals?"

The second part is to "exercise" to find the limts of the "system" you are using. This is how you combine the elements and their "continuous outputs" to see which combination of specific out puts is an analytical "conclusion" of the performance of the system.

One of the examples, above, is one that gives you money and then takes it away during a day (as it's current operation and use is recommended by the OP) This is an example of "system" performance lack of analysis and then making corrections.

Once you find out these basic considerations and how giving such coniderations works,you are ready to go back to the drafting board to learn how to design appoaches for making money.

There is a consideration here of whether synthesis or analysis is the best approach to designing a system to make money. It has to be understood that you synthesize with tooling and you do analytical approaches with the market.

A person here spend 1000 pages doing B and has posted elsewhere that if you compare methods A and B; he finds A is better for making money. He used a lot of A to try to do B and failled after 1000 pages. Failure is not the right word. He just didn't make much money so he is going back to making money now.

Did he approach making money from a synthesis of tools way or from analysis of market operations. No he didn't. That is the point. He comments on how long a post is and why a long post cannot hold his attention.

In arizona, the booths at cafes are scarred by such an orientation. Pistol gun handles and spurs cause such damage. You can recall the first ad Marlboro ran with a Brooklyn male model who had his spurs on upside down as a consequence of a costuming error. Go to Sveiller's in Hudson, Wyoming to talk the the bartender who pointed it out after the shoot on South Pass. They have a blow up next to a moose in the bar today.

You have to take off your spurs and gun belt (be open to input) to begin to get trading down and to make the money offerred.

My first comment on SPM to the OP was the solution to the OP's, freewilly' and schaefer's (may not know yet) problems.

This was suggested came about by my following the path:

Analysis of market>>>>see signals for making money>>>>>get tooling>>>>>calbrate tooling>>>>> use individual tool prime signal>>>>> combine with the other tool prime signals>>>>>tune the combo for a leading indicator of price.

Actually, because of seeing this problem that others have been perpetuating, I actually use the problem as a way of putting the method on the spectrum to determine if I should track it in ET.

So, freewilly, you have some choices ahead. First of all congratulations of do ing the analysis to determine that you have problems. Second congratulations for determining that the signals you are getting are poor or nonextistant and articulating that. third congratulations for formulations a kind of general and potentially germain question that relates to your poblems.

To move forward, you do not have to take off your sixshooter like a lot of people here do. You do have to examine whether you will do synthesis or analysis or their combo to begin to get to having a trading approach.

If you do that, then you get to begin to tool up by learning how tools work. This is difficult from a resourse basis. Because knowing how to know comes into the picture. Many resourses no longer have utility because their authors did the work on the tools before the PC era. All of the example I have given write in ET that they have missed this point so far.

You have a long way to go. There are no short cuts. There are many blind alleys and branches to climb out on.

I made an effort to show some direction on this recently and the post had to be deleted because, as the moderator said, it would cause to many questions to be asked.

Keeping questions at a minimum in ET is an objective that is necessary for reasons of keeping activity lower.

You question, however, I feel is a great one for you personally; it is not the question for fixing SPM or the other examples, however.
More...

it is obvious that you never made a trade with real money

CFerret · Jan 4, 2007

I try to enter all my trades with limit orders put in advance when I see a possible setup which will become a complete setup as soon as order is filled. So the moment of entering is automatic and as fast as possible.

As for looking for setups yes I mostly look at the screen for all six hours, but when you look at it long enough it becomes obvious when setups are probably going to happen and when not and during the working day you have time to have a cup of tea or like that almost without risk of missing a trade.

What I found is only screen time helps you to find good trades and avoid mistakes. To get you must invest. And screen time is IMHO one of the best investments one can make into trading business.

P. S. What time frame do you trade off? Maybe it's worth to increase it a bit if you are too slow to react in current TF.

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How do you find your signals?

Neet

whitster

Atlantic

CFerret