Well said acerbits. Thanks for the comments whistler and its good that you can train traders and be succesful. Boib I guess I can elaborate a little more if you don't mind. I look for divergences between the a/d line and the es and other indices on a 5 minute chart. This is one of the few leading indicators imo. It doesn't always work. Actually recently it hasn't worked that well at all lol. Acerbits comments about being succesful without technical studies echo my experiences. I have had the privelege of knowing some really good traders in my career and most of them do not use many indicators. I have seen first hand the results of these traders while on the otherhand most of the peddlers of trading products will not provide any evidence of their success. Basically I believe that there is no holy grail or magic trendlines on charts.
I agree. Most indicators are just a rehash of price and volume in a nice visial presentation. No predictive power.
buy this book and start studying: http://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Trade-McGraw-Hill-Traders-Edge/dp/0071459588 in regards to calculating pivots, i suggest you ignore the 24hr H,L,C recommendation and opt for intraday time frame(if you decide to scalp). if there ever was a holy grail for trading, this book is it. good luck. you're going to need it.
haha great quote that i imagine sums it up. i'm just starting out as a futures speculator. To me its absurd to ask people what they use, when i figure that out there is no way i'm telling anyone. Lifting the big weights to me is probly losing 20k and struggling for the next 4 years of my life. Blowing up 5k accounts working a shitty job. I view this like i'm just starting medical school, it will be brutally hard and brutally expensive but in the end it will be worth it.
You may wish to reconsider. Think of this as a possibility. Make an excel sheet and annotate a row for each poster here. Make the columns be topics that each has offered in this thread and if they are making money go back and pick off five or six more topics that they have offered. Then make up some new columns for what each could be doing to improvee their market observations. Add some columns for how they could be making decisions and add some columns for how they do actions. You will then see how each can be improving and that what some do overlaps other's efforts. What it all will look like is a progression. Lastly, add a column to rate the person's performance right next to his handle. You can use the terms beginner and advanced beginner and beginning intermediate to cover all the bases. Change the color of the entries in the cells to depict the general aspect of the trading. For example color each leading indicator of what is traded as yellow. If an edge is represented then color the same edge set ups with the same color. Save green for winning elements that deal with keeping a person in the market at all times (All RTH's) Use Pink for the items that keep the person on the right side of the market at all RTH's. Green and pink will give you the winning traders If you find that a person is not using tragets, color his handle bold and balck. Target people will fail over time because they are usurping the market's role. Finally add a column near the handle that says "HASN'T SEEN THE MARKET AS YET". Put an upper case 'X" in that column for each row. Add another column labelled "USES PRICE TO TRADE" again put an X in for everyone so far. Add another column labelled: USES TIME TO TRADE"., Do not put any X's in this column for any of these handles. As you think about becoming a trader, you need to do several things. What you see on your excel sheet is largely a collection of standard orthodoxy ways of doing things where 90% of the traders fail. As you see one reason is that apparently no one has a platform that works. Add a colimn that lists the names of the platforms being used by the handle. To see the markets nowadays requires three or more platforms. Note that no handle has three or more platforms listed. Another reason is that you need to add coded stuff to make the platforms work as well. Add a column for listing the names of the extra coded itiems that a person needs to have to make the combination of platforms work that he is using. I have over 10 for example that relatee to the our platorms I am using. So at this point you are getting close to seeing that there is no learning going on to become a trader if you are not seeing the markets and if you have not recieved the required extras from someone who is using them. Go look at the extras listed on various web locations. You will see several that are crossovers that appear on almost all web lisitngs. Next go to the automated trading web sites that deal with coding. Here you see the "snippet" story. Snippets are names for code blocks that also are sourses of the extras. All trading can be coded and all trading can be displayed in two ways. One way is the usual stuff on platforms and extras. The other way is just a bunch of indicator lights and nothing else on the screen. What does this set of indicator lights represent? You guessed it. It is what is needed to monitor the accumulation of profits all day long. The lights simply tell you that you are in the market, you are on the right side of the market, you are trading the max cars the market can handle, and you see a blink once in a while that says you just parked some more profits in the bank. I do not notice the imposition of any struggle here. I do not notice the requirement of a lot of time passing here. These handles are people who are inventing stuff to get a partial view of something. They invent their way out of trading by losing money or not making very much. The alternative is to know that the market is always right and to to what it says all the time and take all that the market offers out of the market as the market operates. It all works in NOW and there is no betting or guessing going on. Start with six lights. (This is programmer talk for the minimum optimum system.)
Jack: Since a picture is worth a thousand words and that lastpost was close to 1000 could you post an example of your spread sheet.
The only time you have gone on record Jack you lost 24% in a trading contest.. you couldn't even turn a profit without the heat of real money.. LOL