I was just browsing on youtube a little recently. OMG there's SO MANY people trying to sell their training. OMG they charge alot too -- like $200 a month or $1000 lifetime subscription, etc. I looked at some of their videos explaining how to trade. OMG BARF! Or they don't even show you what they really do LOL. Hey, maybe some are good, IDK, it just seems funny to me.

IDK why anyone would use heiken-ashi bars, IMHO I can't see what the point of them is. The purpose of renko is just to eliminate alot of the bars in between the swings, so you can fit more data on the screen, and just to make it easier to look at I guess. Point & figure is the same as renko but it doesn't show any bars in between the swings.

Range bars are the same thing as renko, except that they show the overlapping bars. However most software doesn't calculate renko exactly the same as range bars (like it should), so range bars are the #1 defacto standard. Plus sometimes the overlapping bars of range charts makes a 2-bar swing, when renko only makes a 1-bar swing, and since usually everyone wants to filter out the tiny 1-bar swings, then with renko you would miss that 2-bar swing.

About time charts, if the market moves fast then a bar may be large, so if an algo is waiting for each bar to finish before doing anything, then it'll miss some fast moves. Whereas range bars are always the same size so you know your algo won't miss any fast moves. Yet lots of people still use time charts. I guess they like losing money LOL.

Renko bars are particularly problematic because they rewrite bars. Heikin-Ashi bars are the worst as they basically change the open/close price of the bar which screws up the prices the simulator takes. Any non time based bar will be problematic though.

The bar type determines when your strategy is calculated. So if you're using price or volume to determine that calculation point you're introducing a certain bias into the strategy. It tends to select for bars that only represent a few milliseconds of time. Places where you'd never get the price you want. In other words, it selects trades where the sim is less likely to be accurate to live trading. Something that you'll almost immediately notice when you run the strategy live as kevindog points out.

On the topic of this thread. There are literally thousands of systems available for free that consistently make money. We can argue about Heikin Ashi or Renko, but at the end of the day there are two ways top trade, trend or mean reversion, and there are many, many varieties of the poison for any taste, so to speak. So then why the adage of two traders with the same system is holding up for a long time? One guy will be profitable, another losing using the same set of rules. Setting aside the fact that at least half of the Tube gurus' material is garbage and very few of these mentors will show you their trading account, the key to successful trading is mental, not technical, and the only person who can figure it out is the trader himself. Who knows what triggers my anxiety, recklessness, greed, fear? Why do I exit winning trades too early? Why do I move away my stops when the price gets closer? Why do I go nuts with the size on some days? Why am I afraid of losing and why is winning so important to me? These are the questions (and many more, when the can of worms opens up) every trader has to find the answer to in order to become successful.

Ninety nine percent of trading videos are about the technical. Will the video about the best use of RSI or Bollinger Bands prevent me from being reckless and going nuts with the size on the day when I feel invincible? I doubt it. I can learn all that and will still fuck it up, never mind if it's price action, indicators, Heikin Ashi, Ichimoku or astrology.

And then there is a very large elephant in the room: why on earth would you sell a trading system if you can make shitload of money with it yourself? I am not buying all this crap about "helping other traders who are struggling". You want to help - do it for free. Like Tom Hougaard, for example. Most large brokers conduct regular seminars on every possible aspect of trading - for free, because it is in their interest to have clients that make money. If it's not free then your main purpose is to make money, because you can't make this money in the market. I guess everyone is free to sell whatever they want and to charge whatever they want, but at the end of the day it all comes to a simple honesty: doing another course on technical analysis or algo coding is unlikely to get you out of the seventy plus percent that lose money in the market.

I am getting close to the end of the bitching session. There is no way around it: anything worthwhile is hard and simple at the same time. In trading, technical part is easy, and virtually every possible system works from time to time. The hard part is mental, and that requires tremendous work. Youtubers cannot offer help in this area.

YouTube is a cesspool of what I'd consider illegal and deceptive trading "ads." Here are some example of outrageous ones - that were not hard at all to find:




As far as time based bars, it is hard for most trading software to properly backtest anything but time based bars. I never trust backtests of "exotic" bar types, as the calculations in real time are almost always different than in history.

But your point is sound - you've got to spend your time looking for ways to trade successfully, and not just rely on poor methods.

Kevin

P.S. I just saw a TV show last night about your area, and people searching for WWII balloon bombs in the forests in your area. neat stuff!