Uh, I use stop limit orders for entries and exits. Unless I don't get filled, it's pretty much impossible for me to get "smoked" by anything. When the market comes to me, I enter. I'm not trying to anticipate anything. I might know an hour in advance what price I want. Today, I knew an entry I wanted 5 hours in advance. When the ES got there, my trade triggered. Again, you and I appear to be playing two different games. You're all "I'm gonna make a giant model and think in 5 dimensions" and I'm all "I'm going to think logically about the 1 dimension that gets me what I want". The thing is that your 5 dimensions clearly don't include the 1 that most matters to me, otherwise you wouldn't bother with the other 4.
Charts are 3 dimensional, but I'm not explaining why to you. Also, stop limit orders mean you are taking trades when the price has just moved toward there, and this is an incorrect trading paradigm to base decisions on. I don't need to know if efficiency is lost by decreasing the bar interval.
I'm not using Excel to interface with a broker. I use Excel to custom code the logic and calculations I use because it doesn't resemble anything that any software company building software for traders would think to put in their product. My thinking is orthogonal to that of all extant software trading platforms (although, yes, it could be scripted in a custom coding environment using an API, but then what's the point of getting a product only to ignore all of its out of the box functionality?), but it can be implemented in Excel. Nothing I do depends on speed. It only depends on accuracy. I could call in my orders and it wouldn't make a difference as long as my limit prices got hit.
Then charts are useless in 3 dimensions and I'm not explaining why to you. I don't need visual aids. I actually say that stop limit orders are the absolute best trading paradigm, once you know what you're doing and you don't absolutely NEED any specific individual trade to actually execute. You only want to trade when price "moved toward there", "there" being the predefined place to which price must move in order to initiate a trend as defined by my logical analysis. There are a few academic papers online that show that limit orders are typically a sign of an "informed trader". Not saying that every trader who uses them is "informed", but, on average that appears to be what the data say. Here's a good one: http://apps.olin.wustl.edu/faculty/liuh/papers/limit_vs_market.pdf "Given that limit orders may convey more or less information than market orders depending on fundamental parameters, it becomes an empirical question which order type conveys more information on average in an actual market. Using the TORQ database, we show that limit orders convey more information than market orders about future prices. This implies that informed traders prefer to submit limit orders on average. Moreover, we also show that specialists on the NYSE indeed correctly perceive this informativeness of limit orders." limit orders convey more information than market orders about future prices That pretty much says it all.
This, even if true, has absolutely no importance to me. I'm only making each trade once and for myself. If the market is moving quickly enough, no market order system will provide the same results to two different traders, so a market order system would not strictly speaking be replicable, either. The point is that limit orders represent a higher level of information about future prices. You know, the "future prices" you will be selling or buying back at? Compared to "replicability", I would say that information content is of much higher value.
I think it was Einstein who said something like "The only infinite thing in the universe is human stupidity". Words to live by. I've spent my entire adult lifetime working in 3 cities, namely Boston, Chicago and New York, where encountering big personalities is a daily occurrence and even I think he's over the top. If he's such a badass, let him come to NYC or Chicago and prove it for real. Maybe he will, in which case, more power to him, but if he doesn't, at least then he can shut up about it. I'm not one to dump on him because he may end up losing money with PFG, though. I'm sure people who are smarter than he did as well, unfortunately.
With a mug like that, and the body attached to that pig head, it's impossible for his stupidity not to be inmense. Even bigger than AustinP's. I doubt he has ever get laid without paying. PFG was a con that was very easy to spot years ahead of the perpetration. Multiple clues.