AAA, if you're scalping, 80 signals for potential entry isn't unreasonable, (1 every 5 min)... sounds good to me. i want at least that.
When someone talks about "scalping", what they seem to be usually referring to is the time frame just below the one they are comfortable trading (i.e., the time frame they haven't tried yet, or tried and failed to be profitable in). It's much more informative to define the time scales of the charts you're using, especially the chart that you use for entries/exits. For some of us, 5 minute bars represent huge forests of information. Personally, I think that the entire notion of a "price bar" is just plain stupid, since it tells you so little about what happened within the bar. Anyway, using the proper charts, 80 entries a day is not unthinkable, although it's quite a bit more than what I would be comfortable trading (unless, of course, SL4 is truly insanely great at picking such entries).
I made 22 trades yesterday (7 longs and 15 shorts) and I traded only about 1/3 of the day AND I felt rather bored during those times. I view short term trading (scalping if you want to call it that) -where the trade is usually less than a minute in duration-as one of "the law of large numbers". What I mean is that since the trade is based on such short term info, it will have a higher probability for failure. If I simply acknowledge that going in, and cut my losses very short, the results will be this. Many small losses, many small wins (I take quick profits) and a few large wins (hopefully). On any given day, if I make enough trades, I will catch the one where the stock actually follows through without a short term pullback/wiggle, the futures break out/down at the same time etc. When I let these run for a 1/2 to 1 point or whatever it gives me, I can get to a net profit that is decent. What is my point? Simply that I would love 80 signals a day that were based on something substantive. So that is the question, does SL4 crank out that many dignals of substance? To me, it is substantive if there is a 50% probability that the trade will go my way at least 15 cents before going against me 15 cents since I can be very profitable on that with my execution platform (point direx) and cents per share commish. One final important point. The reason many fail or do not like this style is it requires a committment to keep on pulling the trigger. The market is not nice enough to give you intermittent winners and losers on a 50% probability play (like assuming heads and tails will come up intermittantly when flipping a coin). So if one gets 10 losers in a row, even with small losses it can add up on the P & L and you must have the conviction to keep on going.
Pro, DAT, Thanks, interesting approach. I have never tried trading on that short a timeframe. I learned to trade on the index futures, calling the floor to place trades, and the objective was to hold the trade all day if possible to minimize the brutal slippage. I have a bias towards that approach because it worked for me in the past, but markets change and so do technologies. With direct access and levII, scalping is feasible I guess. I haven't been following this thread just to make life miserable for xcowboy. I liked the look of SL4 and could see, as you say DAT, that something that could give you an edge on many, many entries all day could be a money maker. This product married to IB would be killer. Guys, a practical question. If you make 75-80 trades a day, how do you review your account? I mean, do you go through the clearing firm info each day to confirm they got it all correct? That sounds like a monumental job. I know you can download the tx data but I'm talking about just confirming the accuracy of the trade data.
Greetings...... I am the CEO of SPECTRE INTELLIGENCE and SL4..... We welcome questions which are on the subjects of...... Market Maker Strategy and Deployment....... How a technology like SL4 which is seemingly impossible is indeed possible and scientifically and statistically (in real-time) provable....... How SL4 differs drastically from both technical analysis and the building block system technologies...... We will also address issues which concern the differences between market surveillance and decision support technologies and subjective deterministic models........ I will only recognize comments which are of a intellectual nature and not random emotional outbursts based upon conjecture or opinion....... I recognize that many chatroooms are guiarded by those who are dedicated to the protection of their direct access brokerage kingdom........ SL4 represents a rather significant threat to those examinations of both technical analysis and trading tactical implementations and conclusions predicated upon such......... All that I will say can be proven, without any obligation, by simply viewing that :which cannot possibly exist" For now I invite questions of a clinical nature which will breach the sanctity of our intellectual property yet will gain to those interested a knowledge of how trading strategies are determined on a moment-by-moment basis by those who possess incontrovertably the best form of information.............. Questions? Good Trading to you all...........
Great! There are already several unanswered questions in this thread for SL4, but I'll start again by more or less repeating the latest one: On what basis does SL4 manage to provide 80 or more entry points in one day of trading a typical stock or the eminis? I assume the answer involves several factors that most of us are already familiar with, but also some "proprietary" stuff that we may be less familiar with. It would be helpful to know a bit more about what's going on inside SL4 in this respect (not because we want to steal this stuff, but rather because we would like to have some confidence in the product). Thanks. (For others reading this: Yes, I don't really know who SL4CEO is, but if he knows something about SL4 then that's worth something.)
How a market maker perceives and analyzes Level II data is critically and entirely differnt and distinctive from that of a "typical" retail trader...Having possession of highly sensitive and declosking type "order flow" and "pending execution" transactions is information superiority which is supposedly unavailable and unattainable by traders who would directly benefit from the obvious advantage that this data would foretell. However, this data is further cleverly cloaked by reason of the fact that it is a"shell game" of sorts.....In other words, which market maker currently holds the dominant directional influence in that stock ( it will vary scientifically, statistically, and via volume force countermeasure opponent efforts on a second-by-second basis)...Understand that while the retail trader is attempting to determine the perceived knowledge and intelligence info possessed by the market maker.....the market makers are not only conducting a overall and specific surveillance of their own book, the books of other similar and correlated stocks by affiliated market makers on their desk and floor, as well as what they ajudge to be the dominant market makers (at that instant) in their designated stock.......SL4 conducts a highly incisive and evasive neuro-analytical profile surveillance of the move-by-move "chess pieces" on the screen.....Simply stated, it continually writes highly scientific based equations which record, archive, analogize, and refernce every registered market makers action by action decision predicated upon 1,762,549 equations that relate directly to why, how, what, and when they did what they did and more importantly and significantly that relates and with what level (%) of confidence to the current moment in time, thereby being able to calculate their move-countermove event prior to its occurrence......Essentially the market maker through our systems learned records of their previous actions must therefore come face-to-face with their own predisposed history of strategy enactment and deployment....... Good question........... P.S. I really am the CEO Head Trader of SL4
1,762,549 - where does that come from (perhaps some breakdown of equation types would be helpful)? Also, are you saying that entries are weighted, with it being left up to the user to interpret and test their validity? What about markets such as index futures? Does SL4 try to tie index futures movement back to MM behavior? Just wondering, what are you doing up so late? Are you a late-night software developer like myself, or perhaps located in Europe or Far East? Thanks again. (P.S. I recently tried downloading the on-line demo, but ran into a dialog asking for username/password that I wasn't sure what to do with. Any ideas? Thanks.)