Pour continuer, were I an SCT trader, I would take what seems to be the toughest challenge, detecting YM leading ES, and automate it with two audibles. Surely staring at those one-second charts looking for ephemera all day must be tiring. Perhaps much like the frustration of a snipe hunt. Detecting a "wall" would be another excellent automation challenge, since with limited depth available it comes upon you quickly. Perhaps a Pink Floyd snippet as an audible. I will describe my own use of audibles later, but first let me make a confession. Price movement somehow doesn't seem REAL to me without the accompaniment of an appropriate sound score. Is the dog dangerous if it doesn't growl? Is a woman alluring if she doesn't purr? The market is very Vegas-like, so I use slot machine sounds.
Dr. D, You may wish to have a look at Malcolm Gladwell's book, Blink. (A few weeks ago, I saw that it on sale at the bookstore, so I blinked.) Gladwell provides some interesting insights, a couple of which may even be useful. For example, he makes the case that, in certain instances, our decision making actually degrades with additional information. A case in point is a Chicago area hospital that was short on resources but swamped with ER patients. A common, and therefore time-consuming, complaint was chest pain. Almost in desperation, the doctor in charge of the ER decided to implement an untried "algorithm" for diagnosing chest pain complaints that he read about in a medical journal. The "algorithm" comprised 3 or 4 criteria to the exclusion of all others in determing the nature of care, if any, required by the patient. The doctors under his supervision questioned such a streamlined approach, being more comfortable with a lengthier and more drawn out examination. However, the outcome was surprising. The more streamlined approach significantly improved diagnosis accuracy. There are other interesting examples in the book, but that one gave me pause. There is no substitute for experience and familiarity. And while it pays to be thorough, let us not forget the wisdom of Thoreau.
Hmmm. I didn't read it because Jack recommended it. Thanks, I'll take a peek. I only have on my charts what I have observed consistently for years. Which is a bunch, there being a lot of voodoo out there. We all know that everything works some of the time and nothing works all of the time, so when I see everything bunching up I tend to think the odds are on my side.
Since you brought up simplicity, trading really only requires one skill: the ability to decide if the reversal which is in progress NOW has the legs to be profitable in your trading time frame, be that seconds (like me), or retirement. That is what all TA is about. And it is truly amazing how many different methods there are. Jack has at least five different methods in SCT. If HE can't find just ONE that works, how can WE expect to? (I have about ten that I will trade without hesitation whenever they occur.)
When a consversation resorts to name-calling, it is over. I am unsubscribing to this thread. Ironically, a sign this thread was bad is that SpamGuard immediately marking posts from it as Spam! Must have been the term Pycho that triggered it. Back when I was in college the field was called Human Factors, and then it was call Human Computer Interaction, and look what it called know...
And, really, who could fault you there? Okay, but don't expect much more than some interesting observations. Just curious. How many opportunities have you missed because they did not all bunch up? Have you in any way measured the net benefit of the additional complexity? I'm certainly no better. My approach continually morphs very incrementally, and I keep snapping it back from time to time, resulting in very small, if any, net differences at each iteration. One thing I noticed about my approach, which may or may not differ from that of others, is that I have a principal determinant for trade direction and another for actual entry. There is no overlap between or among each set of rules. (Exits are murkier.) I'm not suggesting that my approach is either better or worse, just that it is fairly uncluttered. Admittedly, I miss some whopper moves, but what does register on the radar is fairly reliable. And since my ego is on the delicate side, I take comfort in that. My attempts at complexity only added to administrative overhead (anxiety and frustration) rather than to reliability or the bottom line. But that's just me.
I think that Dr. Deco was taking exception to the introduction of religion to this thread. There is a forum for all matters religion, but, evidently, that container is not sufficiently airtight. On balance, religion has been the bane of civilization and progress throughout history. Of what possible use is it here?
TD, today was a relatively wide range day with a lot of range outside of yesterday's range. So there was not a lot of bunching up on the daily scale. But at the level of individual moves on the scale of minutes, there is always bunching up. That's where I trade, preferably inside long one-minute bars. Keeps the anxiety level low. What you said about one determinant for trade direction and another for trade entry is exactly what I do on a scale of minutes regularly. But I have a lot of other opportunistic setups I use that may occur only once a day. A collection of edges, as Jack says dismissively. The complexity is in the edges, but the bread and butter is dirt simple, less than 50 lines of code. As to constancy of method, my chart hasn't changed much in two years, just refined continuously, with, as you say, many fruitless deviations. Sort of like Corelli rubbed continuously on his Concerti Grossi. The biggest change I have made recently is with more complex audibles, more about which later.