Daily Charts, Bar Patterns

February 11th, 2010, 11:13 AM

Trades List. Stopped for day. Did well in several markets using Tick charts on Gold and Silver trades, 5 min on the others.

Idea behind playing around with several markets is just to give the rules a bit of a workout by picking any setup that is legal and placing an order even though am not following that market closely.

February 11th, 2010, 04:22 PM

A nice skew trade in ES. In reality I would never have the patience for this. But I find it more interesting to explore new ideas by doing than just reviewing charts and unfortunately lack the programming skills in Ninja to test them out as strategies. (In Tradestation could write them out in about 5 minutes.)

Note how the PT was just above the PVP at time of initiating what was an L2 after negative skew flip (shown in the indy). Stop was a bit above the current market high. #2 put on a couple of ticks below the high with same target. Took 90 minutes (very slow market) but worked perfectly.

I'm telling ya: those PVP's are worth watching!

February 12th, 2010, 11:13 AM

Ninja platform a mess today in early going.

Played with the Wiz's 1 tick chart method (using 5 ticks in Crude) and had about 5 winners in a row in about 10 minutes netting 20 ticks. Interesting. Then had to reboot and the data would not reload properly, could not refresh the database so followed Crude after 9.30 and nothing I did was official. It's a day off. Last weekday of the lunar calendar year.

Hope to finalise trading plan over the weekend in time for the New Year (my New Year's resolution though I didn't bother to point out that my New Year is Feb 14!). The connection seems reliable enough although there are still small timeouts from time to time and I cannot watch streaming video for mysterious reasons. But the data feed works great and that's what matters.

Will emphasise rules that I can control in the plan, less about entry rules since I am a very discretionary type, and more about money management, which includes break-even, recovery rules when underwater, daily goals, weekly goals, behavior routines, and recording/feedback routines so that using the plan and journal yields better information and helps with the journey. There is an aspect of muddle to everything I am and have been doing that needs to be clarified. And this is why I have had a hard time writing out a plan as well. Part of me likes to just wing things. But I have learned that this just doesn't work, even with 65% or better win-loss ratios. Have to maintain my own style and character but develop the means to get clearer on what I am doing in order to make steady income.

February 15th, 2010, 11:06 AM

Markets extremely slow today so nothing so far. Did not work on finalising plan over the weekend, rather took time off. Hope to work on plan later today, and/or if markets pick up will continue Sim-account trades.

February 15th, 2010, 04:47 PM

Pic attached which will be appended to Trading Plan. Examples of signals from Friday session. Guess it was a holiday today but didn't show up on my calendars.

February 16th, 2010, 11:33 AM

Feb 16

Tried writing out signals on chart as in example above. This meant I couldn't track in SS so have simply attached Trade Results from NT instead. Other problem is that it only shows entries, which on many levels are not so important as how trade is managed after entry, but that would make an already too busy chart even busier, not to mention being almost impossible to display clearly.

Difficult session, partly because of basically choppy market which I could have avoided by and large altogether, and partly because my PT's were too large for such a choppy market meaning I was not fully tuned in. I did wait before placing first trade at least 15 mins, but need to add another criteria in terms of being in the zone or not. Suspect I need to add in a morning routine before opening up the computer and will attempt to try this tomorrow.

Had many BE trades with >. 6 ticks profit. In retrospect, if had just taken little bites steadily would have been DONE quite quickly. As it was, went $185 underwater and then caught the first extended move, exiting on volume hesitation at a price which ensured full recovery. Then made a couple of small trades to meet DPT, although the last double was illegal. At this point my concentration was off and I either should have stopped for the day with $36.00 just below minimal DPT, or waited and come back later.

The process of nailing down the rules and drawing them out, though, is helpful, even if a little messy visually. It helps me keep the rules in mind and also displays live (when I draw them) how they look then (which only I know) and then after subsequent price action you see how they did, but also how they look after the fact.

The main challenge now is to pay more attention to the overall market behavior, i.e. is it narrow and choppy or moving nicely. The skew indicator is surprisingly helpful with his even though I am not using it yet for trading, just monitoring. Made an alteration to it this morning so that the bands are printed at the price they would be if the indy was displayed on the chart, i.e. above/below the PVP. I don't plan to put it on the main chart, but it might be nice to see the inner bands around the PVP to monitor if this is a good way of paying attention to choppy conditions and ranges around the PVP.

All in all a good day, even though too many trades and it took a long time. Seem to be coming through a muddled phase after getting high speed and looking at some more live-updating indies which I have now essentially rejected except for EDS price bars which give good granularity in terms of recent prices where there has been particularly heavy volume. Whether this information is truly helpful or not, is another question, but I do like being able to see it.

February 17th, 2010, 11:16 AM

Feb 17

Worst day in a long time. 6 loser one BE. Doing everything wrong and although intention was to follow my new rules, in retrospect I didn't really at all. Furthermore, am not sure why and have to reflect on what was going on mentally.

Took more time to prepare including new more spacious morning routine before opening up computer. Yesterday uninstalled and (though I ) scrubbed NT from computer and did fresh install only adding back in minimal personal indies to get rid of all the endless log errors. That worked, but to my surprise all my ATM strategies survived, and other settings. Don't know where. The main Program Directory was erased. Also the MyDocs/NT6.5 folder was erased. So that info is stored somewhere else. Maybe in the data file which I re-imported? Anyway:

There is commentary on each trade with stats in the attached SS so no point duplicating here. Part of the problem today was that the 30 min chart was so clearly bullish that I was unable to accept the bearish turn in the market. It may well end up up on the day, but in my timeframe that is irrelevant. Also, if I keep trading the long side only will probably make up half the losses or more, but well exceeded daily max loss limit (10% = $500) and so am DONE.

One improvement here, despite learning pain muddles with trying to get very clear on rules etc. (trading plan is basically done now finally but I am not yet ready to implement, hopefully very soon), is that I do have a better take on reading when I am off kilter. As was the case today.

It seems necessary for me to pay more attention to trend so I added colors to the Vwap and MA in the CCLBands indy, and also added the vwap into the indy so they all have same starting time controlled by same input. But then, of course, I simply ignored this today. So hopefully that is a lesson well learned!

I don't think this has anything to do with it, but I have an extremely wicked cold and the medications for cough etc. are making me a little whoozy, although not noticeably so. Also, because eyesight has been deteriorating rapidly past few months (middle age) to the point where I now need reading glasses at the computer whereas only 2 months ago I had no problem seeing it at all and only used them for reading books. I also have a hard time seeing things clearly that are less than about six feet away (versus previous one foot). And because I have been drinking home brew (which is better and much cheaper than govt-controlled products here), decided to stop drinking for a while to see if that helps. Alcohol (and yeast) tax the liver which in turn weakens the eyes. So we'll see if they improve in the next few weeks. And last night (very good sleep despite cold), was first dry night in a while. But again, I don't think that had much to do with what happened today.

February 17th, 2010, 11:46 AM

Tried to save CCLBands with colors. Can't do it. Even after re-installing there are tons of strange errors, like that Bollinger does not exist in the current context (it's a default indicator and the code compiles fine). So back to square one. Have to find out how to REALLY erase NT from the computer. Used Revo Uninstaller last night but apparently that's not enough.

February 17th, 2010, 12:56 PM

cclsys

Tried to save CCLBands with colors. Can't do it....

try adding [XmlIgnore()] for your color, it tells system to ignore system color and use your color serializer instead.

Code

		 [XmlIgnore()]
		[Description("MiddleBandColor")]
        [Category("BandColors")]
        public Color MiddleColor
        {
            get { return middleColor; }
            set { middleColor = value; }
		}

February 17th, 2010, 01:48 PM

Thanks Cory. The errors are not to do with that, though. For example in one indicator it says the reference to Bollinger is incorrect. Even though any reference to Bollinger in that indy has been commented out!

In my Bands indicator it says the reference to DValueAsh is incorrect. DValue Ash compiles fine. So does the bands.

I have a small number of indies which work. I cannot export. That's not a big deal since I can backup with text. But it means that I shall have even less to do with programming. Spent an hour or so very thoroughly uninstalling NT. Checked through the registry. Backed up old indies on external drive which was unplugged during re-install. As soon as I import any of my indies - just the ones I use recently - the same errors as before. NT support cannot offer any assistance. So I guess I am just stuck with a functional trading platform but certain limitations that are not fixable without investing tens or even hundreds of hours to figure out.

Not worth it!

This all started when I changed the hvwap indy start times from "settings" category to "Parameters" in the Properties section. I have deleted hvwap but my substitute with a new name has the same thing. I wonder if that is screwing everything up? I don't see why that would have anything to do with the Bollinger message which is truly weird and not explainable.

Daily Charts, Bar Patterns

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Daily Charts, Bar Patterns