Here's another market that's been trending over a 100 day timeframe although I suspect there's other characteristics your looking for besides that simple rule. I watch this market very closely because it has impact on my day trade decisions eventhough I'm not holding any long term positions in this particular trading instrument. By the way...this attach chart along with the prior two charts I've posted so far are well known, well traded and very liquid markets that's popular among retail traders and institution traders. They are also well discussed here at EliteTrader.com in many different threads by many different types of traders (day traders, position traders, swing traders and long term investors). I'll name them later if you can't figure it out. P.S. I consider anyone holding a position longer than 1 year as an investor eventhough they may see it as a long term trade. Mark (a.k.a. NihabaAshi) Japanese Candlestick term
what about this one? http://hopey.netfonds.no/index-hist...ger_std=2&envelope_period=20&envelope_shift=6
A slightly different question is: which markets have historically produced the highest profits for trend following mechanical systems? I hired a programmer to write software that would run several hundred different trendfollowing mechanical trading systems, against 90 futures markets. Commissions, slippage, volatility, contract size, and foreign currency rate fluctuations were included in the testing. The software built a performance database, which I could then access via queries. Ultimately I decided I liked this question best: For each of the mechanical trading systems, rank the profitability of the 90 futures markets from 1 (best) to 90 (worst). Which market finished in 1st, 2nd, or 3rd place the most often? The systems varied from very "quick" like 2-MA-crossover using 10 days and 5 days, to very "slow" like 250-day channel breakout or 400 day Bollinger Band breakout. For what it's worth, the database's answer to the query above was: http://www.cbot.com/cbot/pub/cont_detail/0,3206,1525+14446,00.html
I guess I should explain my reason for asking this. I have read that certain markets just trend better than others. That is, once they establish an up or down trend they tend to continue that way rather than reverse. I think the issue with my question is I didn't realize how many markets there are, I was expecting replies like "small cap tech stock trend well, currency futures do not" But apprently there are whole indicies and numerous other markets I have yet to hear about. (Ex the Oslo Børs Benchmark Index. WTF is that? beautiful chart though)
Click to enlarge V.10:1 (38-42): Futures According To Trend Tendency by E. Michael Poulos Futures According To Trend Tendency by E. Michael Poulos Not all markets have the same tendency to trend. E. Michael Poulos uses his February 1991 STOCK & COMMODITIES article, "Of trends and random walks," on the random walk index, which separates trends from random drifts by allowing for trend, as the basis of this article. He explains that the commodity futures you may for one reason or another assume trend strongly may not in fact. By using similar methods as previously, he produces a table of 28 commodities futures and debunks some futures assumptions â for instance, there is a school of thought that assumes that crude oil, gasoline and heating oil all show similar trending tendencies, whereas in truth crude oil and gasoline are near the top of the list, and heating oil, the poor country cousin, comes out only near the middle. Poulos goes into why. Which futures trend strongest? My February 1991 article, "Of trends and random walks," explained how the random walk index, which separates trends from random drifts by al- lowing for the direct measurement of trend, could be used toward this end. (See sidebar, "The random walk index.") By using a view of price-time history similar to the one used previously, we can determine how to rank various futures according to their inclination of trend. We attempted to maintain objectivity by not requiring the arbitrary choice of a predetermined fixed lookback interval (for example, the length of a moving average). Other attempted rankings of this kind are often questionable in result because they do not specially distinguish between random drifts and trends. Some results may surprise you. For example, do you believe wheat trends stronger than corn? Or cattle trends stronger than hogs? Wrong. Cattle and wheat are the weakest of the 28 futures covered here. Corn, on the other hand, ranks near the top, sixth out of 28. Do you figure crude oil, gasoline and heating oil all show the same tendency to trend? Wrongo! Crude oil and gasoline are near the top of the list, while heating oil is well down toward the middle. Some explanations are in order. The average channel height for yen (Figure 1) provides some. For the four-day channel length, for example, we start at Day 4 and look back for the highest high and the lowest low from Day 1 through Day 4. We record that high to low difference. We then repeat the above for Day 2 through Day 5, 3 through 6 and so on. We then average all these heights to get the average channel height figure for four day channels. This process is then repeated for each of the a various channel length (that is, lookback intervals). The 2.29 ratio on the four-day row for yen is obtained by dividing the average four-day channel height by the average one-day channel height (141.7 divided by 62.0). For the sake of brevity, we show the average channel height only for yen, but the same procedure was used for all 28 futures (Figure 2). \V10\C01\FUTURES.PDFpad$3.95pad FOR THOSE ORDERING ARTICLES SEPARATELY: *Note: $2.95-$5.95 Articles are in PDF format only. No hard copy of the article(s) will be delivered. During checkout, click the "Download Now" button to immediately receive your article(s) purchase. STOCKS & COMMODITIES magazine is delivered via mail.
Not all, but the majority of trending markets/indexes are just off limits to small speculators. Usually, (again not all) many of these indicies require $100,000-$1mil to participate due to the size of the index and the fact that futures are not available on these indexes. The indexes where futures ARE available to the small types, well those indexes just turn to crap due to all of the manipulation going on to screw the schmucks out of their dough. But since the majority of these small speculators never last long enough to figure out the futures game is just rigged against them, the latest crop of wannabe's refuses to believe until their account balances reach zero and then they just go back to their 9-5 job. Any time the "big boys" decide to make some index available to the public, it's usually time to move on. It means it's manipulated from then on. Happened to the value line years ago, to the e-mini, in the russell and midcaps and they keep introducing more stuff to turn into garbage. So, yeah damn good indexes are out there, just not in some public forum or half-crooked exchange. What's more, the dumb public is taught to believe that they need to come up with special ways to trade the dead markets at these manipulating exchanges it's completely the other way around. In *trending* markets just about ANY technique works because these markets reflect TRUE buying/selling without all the thieves playing games to take your money.
You mean like oil was gold is and silver will become or do you mean more general like commodities currencies or somewhere in between like $XAU and $BKX? Or have I misunderstood the question completely?
What time frame do you plan to trade? 1 min, 5 min, 30 min, swing, position trading? Faster time frames trend better: meaning that they'll have a larger price swing / time period. Do you have a trend trading method? Do you have means to backtest it? Your question is too general for anybody to give you the kind of answer you'd like, even if somebody could and would want to do so. In my opinion more important questions you should try to find answers for are: how to detect the beginning of a trend? how to determine when it's over? how to differentiate between a retracement and a reversal? what kind of position sizing should you use for a trend based method? If you had these answered you wouldn't probably need to ask the present question.
Well most of these questions I have a decent answer to. I do have a trading method outlined (time frame is a couple days to a week or so) and a small universe of stocks which I'll get to practice on and hopefully learn from. My universe of stocks are pretty volatle intraday, but if looked at on a 100 day chart there is some semblence of a trend. I'd love to be trading on instrument that have even more solid trends but stocks are all I know, so I wanted to ask about what else is out there. I guess I just don't know enough to see the flaw in this question.