These people need to do a stint in the army. I see a line, I get in it. I see a group, I join it and do what they are doing. Can't go wrong lol.
What's ironic about this statement, of course, is that if you are successful at trend-following BY DEFINITION you got in before enough people to make it matter. It's the trader you sell or buy from to close your position after a successful trade who's the stupid one (well, depending on that trader's strategy, of course, since they could be working a trend trade at a different timeframe). One of the catchphrases I use to describe my trading strategy to others is that I want to be "the smartest dumb money" in the market. I don't care if the smarter money is in before me, I only care that money dumber than me comes in after me. That's what propels the market in my direction.
I really feel like a dumbass or I am pissed at googledocs ! LOL I spent a quite a bit of time doing some manual backtestkng for some markets for the past 5 months. I was going through and seeing if certain conditions would lead to a trend day the following day. I thought I had saved my spreadsheet on google docs(definitely did) and I go on there right now and its missing . I do remember the results. I tested what I considered a doji. After doing it I found out the definition for a doji was different, here's what I looked at. If the previous day and the open to close +/- .5 percent from the prior day. Didn't consider doji with gaps to be valid so didn't count it. The next day was a bar with a open near the extreme and close at the extreme with at least 1 atr of movement. For APPL(~35%), CL(55%), ZC(25%), ZW(40%), SPY(35%), GE(25%) Also noticed that a decent amount of trend days were captured in this, prob about 60-70% of the ones that I saw. Not a huge sample size, but I was just testing out an idea and seeing if it had something to it. No confirmation bias, I went through bar-by-bar on the TOS and went through one by one after confirming the doji before looking at the prior bar.
Just testing out an idea here, so don't get on me about not having large enough sample size, I am aware of that. I am just trying to identify some general market behaviors, like things I've seen in the past 6 months since I've been trading full-time and putting an ungodly amount of time into this crap lol! Then just find some conditions that might lead to that behavior and testing its validity. Just some intuition and deduction...nothing fancy!
Also having looked at the narrow OR theory...so far it looks to be holding. A confirmed breakout on those narrow opening range days do seem to lead to the bigger, cleaner moves! It conceptually makes sense. Like Mav said more people would tend to be off guard and be caught from a move like that! I guess that why narrow pivots make sense too. I haven't seen alot of consistency with the NR7/NR4 patterns. Something based off of a percentage of ATR might make more sense!
Shan, you should also probably look at using relative volume as a filter intra-day. There are many indicators out there that will give you the % of today's volume relative to say a 30 day average. When you put this indicator in a column it allows one to quickly sort all the more active stocks to the top. If you combine that with the tight opening ranges and tight pivots, you should have yourself everything you need.
RCG, my brother, where art thou? BOJ intervenes tonight. Yen pairs are moving. What's interesting to note, outside the obvious USD/JPY pair, many of the other yen pairs already made and confirmed monthly A ups ahead of the intervention (EUR/JPY, CAD/JPY, AUD/JPY)
I saw the BOJ intervention, but since it happened before the European markets opened, my play would be to wait and see if there is some follow thru on this. BOJ interventions never work. I went ahead and put up some levels, but based on my rules, I would still be flat EURJPY at this time. Do you teach the guys at your shop ACD?
Joe Terranova is telling MF Global traders to go over to MBF to clear. Looks like Mr. Fisher might be getting a major uptick in business.