Personal, I do not like to SUBJECTIVELY INTERPRET pictures especially wrt trading. My trading does not incorporate interpretations because there is only one question. How much is this picture worth? Looks like an FTP or IT IS an FTP??? IT IS an FTP, that picture is worth alot! Ok, I am in FTP modus. Looks like an FTP, what should I do... Well, I know what to do when IT IS an FTP so should I treat what looks like an FTP as if it were an FTP??? Personally, I do not like to include these type of interpretive pictures. As a result of not knowing the picture I sideline and then debrief why I didn't recognize the picture! For me, knowing what the picture is allows me to take the necessary actions. As a result, there are no surprises. In kindergarten, we learned our alphabet using pictures. We were presented a picture of a particular letter and our brains made a connection between the picture and the letter. There is no confusion in whether the letter "A" looked like a letter "B". After all the letters were connected to pictures, we began creating pictures of clusters of letters (ie. pictures of words).... clusters of words for speed readers (ie sentences)... clusters of key words...etc... The kinda pictures lead to shoulda woulda coulda actions. Personally, I have gone to great lengths to produce tools that are crisp. It is FAST pace not a kinda looks like a FAST pace. It is STRetching! There are no maybe's about it when I data gather. Maybe lead to Monday morning quarterbacking. If the picture of now is unknown, my action for that scenario is very simply SIDELINE. In other words, I know what I am supposed to do when I see X, therefore if I don't know X, surely I cannot know what to do... Who am I kidding... Some traders like to use interpretive stuff and I am sure they have their reasons... As long as I can remember, I cannot remember ever being uncertain whether the letter "A" was actually the letter "B". Monet was arguably gifted. What is certain about traders is that there are losers and winners. That picture is clear. Trades occur at a price and time. That is clear. Collections of trades have a direction. A pair of collections from correlated instruments will have a single leading collection... These pictures are very clear for me... MAK!
Ex - assume the front leaning center position! Mak, this is such a neat post partly because I agree so strongly with you on this, and partly because it brings up some specific things I am struggling with. Again, it gets back to atomic steps, by the numbers, sets of sequences, etc, etc. My wife and I homeschool our kids - currently it's two, but we have three more in the chute. We teach (taught) our kids the alphabet using, as you say, pictures. To add a bit of elaboration, we pick one letter and work on it solely for an ENTIRE week. We start with solely the uppercase letter. We show them the letter and associate it with a bunch of pictures that begin with that letter (we let them pick the pictures.) As the week progresses, we move into actually writing the letter (following arrowed outlines.) We have to show them how to hold the pencil, and how to make the strokes. Later in the year, we start on the lower case letters. There's more involved, but you get the idea. The point I'm trying to make is that there are a bunch of activities going on in the background which strongly support the learning process so that the picture is instantly recognizable and repeatable. Note, I'm agreeing with you, but pointing out to any who may assume that what we are working on is "easy." There is a bunch of work which needs to be done to make permanent progress. Crisp like a new $100 bill! The tools are nothing shy of fantastic. Now, I'm going to step out and open up on a couple of my pictures. Fast pace LOOKS like a fast pace! BUT, will a fast pace ALWAYS look like it does today? How do I *KNOW* that the fast pace won't look different tomorrow? Next week? Next year? OK - no need to fix me - I'll get there by myself - but what I need to do is figure out the atomic components of pace, rebuild a bunch of pace settings from a bunch of periods, and see how those relate to price formations. For now, it is sufficient for me to accept what is given me, and become proficient with it. Str/squ is the same way, except I'm in the place of just trying to recognize it. But in the back of my mind, I'm wondering what atomic components make this up? Lots of work to go for me on this yet, so I'll try to refrain from asking questions and rather just observe the unfolding discussion
Excellent, I'm glad to hear this. On Tuesday I started w/ FV=51 from indexarb but recentered numerous times as the morning progressed, finally settling on 46. I sense from your posts you are very efficient when recentering and instantly confident in the new number. But for me each adjustment is followed by a period of looking for confirmation that the new number is actually in center. Certainly my manual recentering will improve with experience, but automating a RT adjustment would be ideal. I've got a strong interest in this so let me know if you want a hand working through it.
With Camtasia, you may produce your video as an animated GIF file which is easily posted and quite small. <img src="http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/attachment.php?s=&postid=826169">
MAK! thanks so much for the reply, I can say that I agree 100% with your comments. My intention was not to suggest that trading pictures should be interpreted with subjectivity, but that the emotions each person has play a part in how we observe. Your tools, and comments help tremendously in providing a context to move past our emotions and SEE what IS. Iâm printing the above quote from MAK and putting it on the wall!! This helps to end some of my personal struggles. EX
Excellent ETLURKER... Thanks. Your solution will help alot. I've got another 5M clip I want to post so I will use your solution to get that up. Before I post the clip, I will lay out some ground work. TXUK, with regards to the explicit STR.NEUT.SQU, my confirmations are on the very next DOM bar. Yes for me, it is an auto thing. As mentioned before, there are many ways to skin the cat. STR.NEUT.SQU is not a necessity for most. PRV is not a necessity for most. There are every coarser tools that get the job done. I am sort of a minimilist and usually can see how a very fine tool can accomplish the same measurement as a coarse tool; like seeing channels on MarketDepth or BOOKTRADER. It comes with time... This is the brain bundling connections into a single set. When you lift your arm, many connections get fire simulatenously. That is the "LIFT ARM" bundle. You just know what the picture looks like from all altitudes and how the very neatly fit together... Alright so there is work to do to work in the abstract STR.NEUT.SQU... So for some time, some of you have been watching the STR.NEUT.SQU do it's thing and some of you have been having difficulty dealing with the flaws that pop up. What IS important is the fact that many of you realize with certainty that the YM leads. We can break down into a partnership. If you are mathematically rigorous, you can just do a correlation of YM bars and ES bars. The correlation is very SIGNIFICANT. With the explicit STR.NEUT.SQU, the measurement is of the offset between the cash and futures. We watch these folks do their thing. But what if we could switch up the dancing partners to be between FUTURES and FUTURES instead of CASH and FUTURES. It turns out, we can do this also, with a slight of hand. So in this later scenario, we can watch the STR.NEUT.SQU of the FUTURES pair. Our tool does one simple thing, measure the offset. It is blind to who the pairs are but of course it is necessary to understand the fact that it is just a tool and the user must know how to use it PROPERLY. Sometimes you can use a flathead to do the job of a phillips. You know when it is compatible. You can use a tool in a wide range of jobs and it will get the job done. In other words wherever offsets are applicable (ie. highly correlated pairs), we can take a meaningful measure of the offset. This is not some kinda looks correlated, it is a definitely SIGNIFICANT (ie. measurable) correlation value. Do not ask me about correlation, you will have to do your own homework to understand it, just like all the other descriptors we talk about. I am not going to get into an answering every question that pops up type of thing. I try to answer as many as I can so as to keep some trolling at bay. It is alot of time and work. So how do we leverage our OFFSET measuring tool? We can use it on our FUTURES/FUTURES partners as opposed to FUTURES/CASH. Because we know how it works, we know how to adjust it to measure FUTURES/FUTURES. Additionally, we will need to address the whole where is the right side of the market from a STR.NEUT.SQU perspective. Every tool has a right side of the market. CHANNELS = RIGHT LINE. BAR/VOLUME = RED/GREEN (for me). DOM=MIN SIZE, OFFSET=STR/SQU. These are confirmations on top of confirmations. Sweeping effectively moves you from where, when, and which tool to focus on wrt the "RIGHT SIDE". So with the ABSTRACT/GENERIC OFFSET we bridge two components. A single fractal bar and STR.NEUT.SQU. As with everything else, we will use pairs of now bars so as to simultaneous gather the offset data and it's confirmation. In the previous posted vid, you saw the abstract to the right of the PRV. It is a pair of 5M bars. One bar is an ES 5M the other is a YM 5M. My bars are slightly different in that they are 5M DOM BARS. There is no charting app that I know of that configures there bars this way. For me, it doesn't matter since I know the difference between the ordinary bars and DOM bars so I know what it is that I am looking for using any type of bar chart. When the bar opens, I watch the opening bid ask pairs of both YM/ES 5M bars. I watch very closely as I am looking for the right side of this new bar, this is SCT NOW for me so I do not care about the previous bar. My pictures is the FUTURES/CASH dance and because of correlation, the FUTURES/FUTURES dance also. So I watch the YM bid/ask pairs lead the ES bid/ask pairs. Whichever way the YM bid/ask pair steps out, I follow along. I lean back when the PRV reads, the step is FAST/EXTREME. And we're off... So for an RT pic... cont... MAK!