I don't use classical TA but use things I have noticed by myself over loads of screentime. It can't be programmed but is de facto a algorythm that I use to keep things objective. Got out btw at 12640.
To be fair, it depends on how you use it. Peter Brandt, he of classical charting principles, openly says chart patterns do not provide an edge, trade and risk management do. His long term win rate is below 50%, low to mid 40s I believe. He reckons 85% of his profits come from 15% of his trades, which tells me he is pretty good at trade management. I have no idea if any of these metrics apply to day trading, I suspect they probably do for some styles. Successful scalpers, and I know one personally, have win rates around 90% but crap R:R that I have difficulty living with. I used to swing trade successfully using MACD, truth be told I spent upwards of 1000 hours that first year working purely on trade management. Moved on, now I’m back to day trading, not yet successful, but it is one of those things I want to accomplish before I die. If anyone trades successfully with chart patterns, or indicators, those are not the edge. They give a clear structure on which to build discipline, and trade and risk management. I’ve been trading long enough to recognize that unless you are exploiting a short term market imbalance, it really is a coin toss. You put the odds in your favor if you can spot a trend, there are research papers attesting to this, and that trend can be on anything from a 1 minute chart to a daily, weekly or monthly chart. I trade the 1 minute chart, Alexander Elder wrote of a chap who traded the monthly charts and spent his time going around the pro ice skating circuit with his granddaughter. When I was trading FX, I recognised the mean reverting tendency and used a simple oscillator and data analysis to provide structure. That doesn’t apply to what I trade now, the DAX, which is why I follow this journal. I use a different method now, and the pig I’m wrestling with in day trading is my mind; you don’t have the distance swing trading gives you, so you wrestle with demons all day long. That aside, I have a pretty solid method. Don’t discourage the man, if he has a structure he believes in, which is more than most people here have, then all he needs is risk and trade management to be successful. If he has those, there is nothing to stop him from making a living trading. Only idiots lose money in bull markets. It’s ranging markets that separate traders from the rest.
The reason I threw my jab in was to get cvds16 to think. You see I actually think cvds is intelligent, enough so that I have been a follower of him/her a while. It's my way to to get him/her to either question themselves or question me, so no offense met. But there are lots of ET posters imo who a following a well worn rut route which leads nowhere. Think about it, let's say 90% of traders struggle/fail, 90% of traders use TA indicators, 90% of ET'ers think they are clever and their secret sauce modified indicator is a little better than used by others, 90% of traders spend an unordinate amount of time scrutinising and dissecting data and charts and every other week trying another approach. Surely one would need to think about what they are doing. However, I'm happy for people to do whatever they wish to do, it is a natural reaction on ET to be defensive about TA because that's what the majority believe. Marketsurfer was anti TA but he didn't have an alternatve solution as much as he believed he did. I'm not anti TA, just that imo its a red heering in trading, leading one down a rabbit hole.
I can fully understand the scepticism about technical analysis. I have been banging my head around this for years. But I believe that by combining some things I finally have come up with a multi-time frame approach (which should be actually 4 dimensional, not 3 as I previously thought) that might work. It's not programmable and it's not pure mathematically. Thanks for the compliment btw. I did have an easier time when I was market making options about 10 years ago. The consistent results that I got there for some years kept me going at this endeavour + I am on sick leave so really got nothing better to do with my time so I persevear with this. Will see how this ends ...
I won't give all my stuff away but to make this journal somewhat more interesting I will give some signals from time to time. What made me go short this morning was an inside bar on the 30M in stoch overbought. Let's see how far this takes us. For those following the future: the CFD is priced about 12 points above the Dax-future.
going to take profit at 12589 since the morning session is nearing it's end. Back at 16:00 CET to play the afternoon session. EDIT: decided to wait a little longer to take profits, so my position is still open. EDIT: going try to cover now at 12583.5
closed manually at 12585. Was a bit trying too much there,missed it by 0.02 points. Still a nice morning with 47 points. I have to admit I just had to sit and wait though so trending behaviour made things easy.