I did that in '95. I got some prized memory for my Mac, took a two week vacation from work, the market(as I knew it then), reality and did nothing but play centipede and drink Beck's. I'm still bleeding
Oh I don't know, from my viewpoint trading sure feels like a computer game. My keypad is setup as hotkeys for order handling to my broker and unique wave files correspond to order fills and partial fills. I use a left-handed mouse to scroll across my monitors and annotate charts. Annotating takes 2-3 clicks of the mouse with the left hand and sending off an order takes 2 clicks of the keypad with the right hand. Unique sounds of 5s to 10s in duration come at me every 30s, 1m, 2m, 5m, 15m, 30m, 60m. The sounds are staggered 5s to 30s apart so they come at me in a sequence when the slower time bars are nearing completion. They keep me in a good rhythm especially with the prv and save me from having to watch the clock to get my bearings. Nature sounds work the best in terms of not being tiring to hear repetitively, but I sometimes use a Tibetan chant that lasts 8s as my 5m alert. When the chant ends I know the NOW will switch to a new 5m bar. ET doesn't allow posting a wave file so I'm attaching it with a .txt extension. Change it to .wav if you want to hear it.
I was just never able to get the sct thing working with any consistency and just got tired of trying. I dont know anybody other than Jack who can do it so its obviously not an easy thing to accomplish; so, I have slowly slipped back into distraction mode. I know a good 15 minutes before I will have to act so its no problem doing other things. I hope to see somebody get the thing down some day but it will take someone younger and smarter than me.
I don´t aim for sct, never did I guess. I think of Jacks method as a method to learn how to read the market, and that´s how I thought about it from the beginning. Now when I look at an indicator I haven´t seen I can spot fast what they´re showing, at least the basics. The same when I read strategies and look at charts with examples - nothing seems new, I understand the basic principle. I have something to relate to, which is great. Something completely different - I often follow DAX in the mornings to get a little extra practise, and just out of curiousity - has anybody here traded dax? That market can move FAST. I imagine the slippage is huge if you get in at the wrong time, it can jump 5 points in a split second.
thanks for the reference. it seems that cd is no longer available for sale. anyway, sound clips of music or singing gets irritating after hearing it repeatedly. the 5m alert alone comes at me more than 81 times a day including the few cycles in pre-market. i've found nature sounds do not have a tiring effect on me. my 30s alert is a 1s clip of a loon (hehe..i know what you're thinking); actually it's a 1m cycle but it comes at the 30s mark of the 1m bar and just tells me that i should take a prv reading. at the one minute mark itself i get a sound of a brook that begins 5s prior to the end of the 1m bar; when the sound ends a new 1m bar begins. the other alerts work similarly and when a 60m bar forms i get a sequence of all sounds one after the other starting from 30s before the end of the bar. it's just a way to get my ears to help out my eyes which do most of the sensing work.
You noticed those clues and acted on them in real-time? This is great. Congratulations! Interesting that, besides the volume divergence, the trend change was signaled by two opposite volume extreme: a buying climax (end of up trend) and a dry-up (end of the small up retracement).
Easyrider, do you enter on anticipation on a retrace like that or do you always wait for confirmation, trendline of the retracement broken?
hum hum, I was talking about the retracement around 12.30 which was on my mind, maybe that was not the subject after all...