The emotions of Fear and Greed can impact our decision process during trading. Fear perhaps being the stronger (more afraid of losing on a trade vs feeling afraid of winning on a trade). Does use of or lack of color on your chart make a difference to your trading? Red is a stimulating, intense color, invokes excitement, one could say aggression. Elevates blood pressure, respiratory rate. Blue is calming, trustworthy, harmonious (the sky, the sea), lowers blood pressure. Denise Shull - trading performance psychology - recommends removing red/green, red/blue. specifically removing Red. My setup, I rarely change a thing. Already use black-background charts, this week removed price colors such as red or blue to hollow-body and grays. When a strategy setup occurs at a price level/bar, the strat color splotches the bar, that's it. Was I more rational in decision-making (slower, considerate thinking, focused on price) with the grays...yes. Too early to tell or imagined. If there are edges everywhere, is this a trivial one?
I think anytime you change something, it's obviously going to feel/seem different. How long that lasts is another story. Can't hurt, unless it does. Time will tell. I went to a lighter chart background, black was too intense for me. Change is fine as long as it's not trying to cover up a trading issue: fear, greed.... what have you.
Via: https://www.helpscout.net/blog/psychology-of-color/ About brand messaging and use of color: "In an appropriately titled study called Impact of Color in Marketing, researchers found that up to 90% of snap judgments made about products can be based on color alone (depending on the product)." What does this have to do with trading? Snap judgments will eat your edge or color (!) your perception of risk. If there are any parallels to trading then it's gray CANDLES or HOLLOW-BODY or LINE all the way: calm, balance.
The question I would ask is which is more powerful, the emotions that are stimulated by the colours, or the association one develops with regard to that colour. I swing trade now, but when I day traded, the emotion attached to the colour was dependent on the direction I was trading. If short, red was great and blue (my favourite colour BTW) was undesirable to outright bad if I was going to be taken out soon after entry. As for background I use light grey. Easier on my eyes.
In using data to trade, it is easy to crash a trading platform with too many "hilights" created using mathematical expressions to symbolize what and how a trend is forwarding. This is probably just the limited understanding of the platform provider. I "know I know" at all times and my cycle of processing (perception) is 10 to 100 milliseconds. (some have quoted me improperly ... lol).what makes taking the "full offer of the market" easiest is sensing rapidly and turning the sensing into perception. Color has no influence on a fully differentiated mind. It is MOST useful to a fully differentiated mind. Using color is a very very sophisticated process in real time live trading. When a trader is making a multiple of the daily ATR, his greatest dependency in processing information is in the use of color and symbols in color. For price, I color two clases: sentiment and stat sig of a parcel (8 out of 10 carcels have no stat sig) fro the leading indicator of price I use rays to signify what is "in force" in the forwarding of a trend. thus I get test bands which allow me to SEE an end effect in 10 to 100 milliseconds. There is no real hurry to carve the turns during the day since each parcel strteches way out over 300 seconds. when a lateral forms I only box in and provide a color field for the first three bars that form the lateral. After that I just number the lateral bar in the lateral. I symbolize (diamonds, cicles and triangles in orientations) the BO of the lateral according to the bar of the lateral BO. the question and its suggested modifications tell as story in ET. the story is that most ET members do not know two important things: 1. How learning works, and 2. how the mind works. Both of these are more important than farting around with the Q's in this thread. How can you tool up your displays (or even think they have any use (lol) if you cannot learn or think? read Nitro's latest seige of threads. read his Q's and do that in the context of his posting count. It takes a real long runway for some people to even get off the ground.
Thanks Jack. You bring up rays and symbols vs color? I use trendlines heavily. I don't try to predict future price until I have several datapoints. I don't or wouldn't draw probability rays if that is what you mean, but that is interesting programmatically. Actually I get my turns from another input and the TL confirms, then I go. Would you clarify this: Color has no influence yet one has the greatest dependency. Are you saying the thread question is wrong? Pynchon said if they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers. So what is the right question. I am in the process of moving my charts to grayscale for price clarity, eliminate reds,blues, market bias neutral to really 'see' the setup of the strategy which some folks might call 'being in the now'. (see eckhart tolle). The intent of the thread was: Does it make a difference or have I not peeled the onion enough.
Are the people that respond as if Hershey was serious, paid shills or just fellow mental cases? If the former, how do I get on the payroll.
I only use colored rays on the independent variable. I differentiate Price to "SEE" the RDBMS signals by butting color in the case containers. I do not use setups, ever.
People extend themselves by using tools. Tools enable greater reach, etc.. Influence is more related to feeling than intellect. Feeling is usually a signal to make a system repair. See Behavioral Finance. To make the most of intellect, it is good to use tools that provide "perception" immediately. The main operators of the mind are O-1 space, O-2 shape and O-3 change of shape. I have reasoned through that the ends of trends occur with respect to any one of 10 bands. So I bound the bands with color boundaries by using just four colors. There are 35 endings possible. I need to "SEE" the singular answer during the information parcel (forming bar). thus, I do not have "influences" all I have is 100% certain precise answers dictated by the independent variable. Those that work with the dependent variable only, do have emotional aspects to deal with since they do not "SEE" the independent variable where the primary intellectual processing is done. The trading ball park is like the misjudgements and unkind remarks of 777. He see's shills and payment for posting by a crazy person. He has never seen the market's system of operation, however. Taking the full offer of the market is not something his mind can process since its differentiation process is broken permanently. turn to another color use. I have an answer sheet for doing reversals throughout the day. It has eight colors. four are hot and four are cold. This is not to influence. The hot colors are failsafe colors. The cold colors are "MADA "routine" colors. Reversals are done for one of two reasons: orderliness or disruption. If orderliness prevails no fail safe is interjected. If a disruption comes along, then capital is automatically preserved by a "big brother" type intellectual tool. There is no noise, no flaws nor any anomalies; why introduce any risk under these intellectual contexts? By trading for 55 years, I have done considerable learning and thinking. I guess I could just trade any system presented to me. the flow of the markets is slow compared to the process going on in the mind. this means there is much more time available than is required. Color is an adjunct for tools. It makes their utility higher since the mind processes their information much more easily without any influence. I believe Tufte wrotemost clearly on this in his books: "Evolving Information" and "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information". All I have done is enlarge the topics to include the qualitative decision making. 777 is making a point. His meaning is subjunctive, however. He doesn't know what he is talking about BUT he is correct that something important is going on and it is well beyond his irreversably limited means of comprehension (a result of poor decision making and getting the consequences).