Hello everyone, it's time to move from lurking and reading about other traders' success and failure journeys and write a story of my own. This journal is to help make me accountable and motivated to move from endless hours of hindsight analysis as a hobby to a hard right edge trading as a business. I've spent several years on and off doing market analysis, watching price behavior, traded here and there, did some coding and backtesting in WealthLab and TradeStation. I've kept my own notebook journaling price behavior observations and personal reflections related to both trading and life. I've spent a lot of time with SPY, eventually wanting to move to ES and other futures when less risk averse and more coherent executable trading business plan is established. most of my concepts come from the works of tony oz, alexander elder and alan farley as well as quants on blogosphere i.e. stokes, varadi, murphy etc...multi-time frame, recursive/fractal channel trading, cofluence of oscillators, trendlines, horizontal S/R, fibb etc...trivially worded and/or pictorially defined concepts, yet it took me years of on and off observation to appreciate or acknowledge or to make sense of on my own...i guess i was obsessed with trying to capture every zig-zag as well as tops and bottoms which gave rise to multi-time frame fractal characterization...idea was to code it all to avoid a long list of physchological impediments and i fell short....hence have to do discretionary trading then code the exits and eventually entries.... one of challenges is traversing up and down the time frames and getting stuck in execution lower time frame when actually observing a trade setup or getting a signal off of higher time frame...another challenge is executing and managing positions while working my day job during RTH. the good news is i have whole lot of vacation time off at the end of year and thinking of doing the combine program and/or finishing all of code development. most of my signals and/or setups are such that trades are anywhere from a day to a week trying to capture some multiple of ATR, where as combine is probably geared toward daytrading with trades lasting from minutes to perhaps couple or few hours at the most. due to fractal modeling i suppose i could do combine with the observation that every zig is made of zig and zags of its own or rather some range, congestion and breakout directional move...we'll see.... the basic channel trades are either trend mean-reversion, trend pull back, sideways, ranging channel boundary fading, or channel breakouts and strong directional moves in direction of present trend or forming trend reversal ( aka fat tails). in summary, to me the most important thing is to follow price and interpret price behavior through TA analysis. this is my understanding of term Price Action... sounds great in theory, then there is practice.... cheers, tihfa ps please refrain from disparaging or non-constructive remarks...thanks
Good stuff. The problem with a fixed line is you are constantly adjusting/redrawing for the volatility, unlike a bollinger or a keltner band. Marrying the volatility to whatever you are doing is key, at least it is currently what I'm working on. If the best systems are trend-following, then find those breakouts right? What shows breakouts best? (Donchian, BB's or channel breakouts, etc) Do you combine any of those? What are your time-frames/instruments? Good luck on your journey.