Well, people do get frightened by various things, but if you do not want to center this on zero you can always add some positive constant to shift it up, so that you can have positive values, but the thing will still be inverted. That all depends on your software... What do I care... I am very comfortable trading without standing on my head, but I do realize that this might be too simplistic for some...
My dearest brother Candlesticker, I love this, ...my current trading style is akin to being a glider who seeks the occasional thermal and then simply enjoys the ride... it moved me. love in my heart for you my brother.. carry on your greatness
the 'what' and 'how' of it. what: 4 futures mkts: ym/qm/er2/eur how: intraday trend following using cci... from the description you gave, you averaged about 1.5 trades per day for the last month? That's close to me, i'm avging about 2.5 trades per day....higher frequency....maybe less efficient than you? still the profits are nice. (let me preface that i'm relatively new to trading, 3 years, most of which was as an unprofitable trader...so i still have a lot to learn yes). I had started out in stocks knowing nothing. However, I knew before i ever began trading that the true secret was in one's own mind, not the market. I therefore began my journey from the psychological angle. This prevented me from losing excessive amounts of money however, I was deficient in learning about market behavior and therefore had never learned efficient entries/exits. Last year i began learning the cci because i awoke to the fact that I 'had no system' and there was woodie with a completely detailed system for free. So i scrapped all that i had up to that point (except the fundamental truths of risk and reward). fast forward after many months of trial and error getting the system to work for me. or rather i should say, i had to work the system. I didn't realize what i was doing wrong until I functionally saw that an individual whose trading skill i respect was consistently getting in earlier than me and staying consistently for more ticks than me....that's when i had the AHA moment. There is an interesting phenomenom. We hear things and understand things and agree with things....but we are not necessarily able to ACT upon those things at a functional level until they are deeply embedded within us. what is this process of embedding? how does it work? hmmm repitition???? I can sit down and play the piano whithout TRYING to play the piano. I learned through trial and error (and being educated) that certain finger placement is more efficient than other finger placement. When placing the fingers in the proper order, playing the piano became/becomes easy. Not just that but the fingers themselves develop a memory, they just automatically snap to the correct places they have to be at the right time to do the right thing.... so thus is how it is in trading...or how it has become for me. every day i sit down and know what i need to see. I'm not TRYING to see anything. If it's not present, i do nothing. I recognize that there are more opportunities in the day than i am exploiting, however I have not seen the need financially to move beyond where i am now. My gut is that I think i would rather move to swing trading stocks with my current method than try to extract more profit in the same time frame that i'm currently at. make sense? i don't know if this was the kind of post you were soliciting candle, but here it is nonetheless.
That's very important. I keep saying the same: you need to have your entry and exit defined very clearly so you have no doubts or else you will be taking trades that you should not be taking... That obviously leads to rather few trades but that's fine as long as you are profitable and enjoy it...