Again; intriguing. FWIW, I do know some basic code and am planning to become competent eventually. I also agree that markets are not news driven, but technical in nature. At least intraday. It's still not clear to me what you mean by 'code whatever instrument'. Are you talking about coding strategies for an instrument? Or something else entirely? Thanks in advance. Howard
Most of those who are pure chartists, won't be using SMA's as they have learned what is too far from lows as regarding pullbacks to believe in existing trend, and say new trend has appeared. So it not intuition or reluctance to share, but more of years of study and almost impossible to teach. Speed of price action often give different stats whether new "pullback" is continuous or new trend as well, price could "base" for hours forming heavy support for accumulation or larger traders could be adding to shorts. I prefer to use like slope of 20 SMA and new trends can start when entire couple of bars ranges' thrusting in direction of new trend and SMA is flat or sloping in direction of new trend. This definition is easier to program. You asking about "reversals or pullbacks" have much to do with trend or how far back would heavier traders deem trend changes to occur. It makes more sense to study extremes of moves than pullbacks and develop your own stats, you will find many patterns at these extremes to stop you from taking that pullback loss. Half my trading is scalping and all scalps do have runners in case of "luck" happens and be able to hang in for larger moves, ES allows for more volume but less profit per trade, whereas currencies and energies much less "safer" volume but more ticks per scalp can be had with same risk. Other half is Hedged & 30 minute timeframe up to monthly bars for much larger profit per profitable trade and less than 50% occurrence's of getting into profitable trade. For me, always been trade offs. Whether it is defining trend or style of trading-I rather go with "mean" consistency defined by stats. And if you are married or have girlfriend, most will not like you spending 18 hours a day, everyday, for years and stay with you, better to hire others to help your motives. Of course if you hoping either to leave you, LOL, good way to get rid of them.
If you want trading answers on volatility contenders, then code it. Quality vs dog contenders, code it..... Breakouts... What's trending...what's not.... Overbought, oversold.... Etc.... It all depends on what you trade and how you want to trade. If your experience is limited, your vision on what is possible is limited, longer you are in the game the more possibilities come to you.
On a general wide ranging market breakout, it is even possible to code an algo for stocks which have the highest probability of breaking out and running/leading the pack. All is only limited by the amount of imagination, nearly anything can be coded one way or another. Sometimes I run into a problem, but after a week or so of mulling about it, usually always get a way of doing the job.
Social pressures (family) and financial pressures (family) are the weights on most retail traders...increases dramatically for each month that goes by without consistent profits. A retail trader must have a good support system in place from the beginning to the end of the career...a few hiccups in between of the support is normal. wrbtrader
I never had pressures of family, but had good job, had a good business, had real estate with rental income, profitable in stocks, had collateral with banks for more loans when I lost learning how to trade commodities-LOL but never had any good family support with exception of bad support at time going through divorce which I do know caused more disharmony of self. I am one who tolerates most people all my life, very frustrating to have to even be with people for me, and ill mannered people are worst for me, often wonder why I stay on this "enquirer" type forum. But I do have my favorites of offering solid posts like yours to offer good ideas. I think "dreams of grandeur" hurt most people as it never comes and those who work the long hours too tired of dreaming. I think limited test everything that comes to mind till by error each find their "edge". I think if most were doing a fall back to bring home some type of funds into family would take off much stresses. Their lack of planning in fund generation while learning, also lack of planning on how and what to study contributes to lack of knowledge. I do know this, if I had to do over again, I would have concentrated all my time into longer term only of stocks and commodities and not gone into scalping. Was insane amount of time to learn how to do it profitably without aid, internet was just starting and really not many books on trading at the time of mid 80s. Fees were way too high in futures then to day trade.
Ah. If that's what you meant by coding, I'm already deep into the rabbithole and started this years ago. I have proprietary software for backtesting/backchecking and have done a lot of work in Excel on this. But I am learning to program myself in order to have complete control of my current and future operations. So, having that in place, I'm now focusing on improving execution and signals.
ES now: Retracement still or a reversal? Other parts of my system is not in agreement, so I'm not buying this today. I'm thinking this is what some people would call a false breakout or merely a retracement going further than the prior ones. But this is in essence what I'm asking. Still trialing trend lines, by the way. And working on rules for how to use them.