[Soultrader]

Originally Posted by MC »

I'm learning more and more every day which is awesome. End of October will be 2 years for me so I'm a baby to the game still. I am getting to the point where I realize some indicators/internals are needed to help tilt the odds. But the core and trigger needs to be price action or what you see on the chart directly. It's hard to put into words what momentum "looks" like because when you've paid your screen time dues things start to "feel" more than "look".

Absolutely true. Screen time for the markets you trade enables one to become familiar with the price movements and characteristics of the instrument. Given enough experience and screen time, one will be able to recognize patterns hinting weakness/strength, breakout patterns, reversal patterns, etc... Reading volume for the market you trade is critical in my opinion... which does take some time to learn. The only indication I ever use in my trading is whether is it being accumulated or distributed. The indicator I use for this? Volume and the relationship between high/low/close/open per bar. Heres an example of the indicator I use on the ES from yesterday.

[MC]

Great stuff James. I noted both those points in my chat today as I was tracking SPY and practicing on a 5 minute chart oddly enough. I faded both times for a scalper and an attempted trend freebie. First one no trend trade, 2nd one did well.

I still am interested in MP but can't afford a solid setup with data at this stage.

I owe alot of what I know to TL. I combine VSA with other things I've picked up here and elsewhere. It's nice to finally be feeling the action instead of seeing it.

Originally Posted by MC »

You're telling me you've jumped into trading for a living after about 10 months of experience?

Yes, I have.

Originally Posted by Hlm »

Original question: [B]
Maybe the original poster meant system instead of strategy.

I call buy and sell signals a strategy. This is meant a strategy in a language of traders in my country.

Originally Posted by Soultrader »

Reading volume for the market you trade is critical in my opinion... which does take some time to learn. The only indication I ever use in my trading is whether is it being accumulated or distributed. The indicator I use for this? Volume and the relationship between high/low/close/open per bar. Heres an example of the indicator I use on the ES from yesterday.

I agree 100%. In my future strategy / system I will additionally filter volume by actual open interest. I volume bar of 1,000 contracts when OI is 50,000 is something different than a volume bar of 1,000 contracts when OI is 150,000.

[bootstrap]

Originally Posted by Tresor »

I call buy and sell signals a strategy. This is meant a strategy in a language of traders in my country.

i might as well give you a little heads up then. Buy and Sell signals make up about 10% of a trading strategy. why are you buying or selling? how do you determine position size, do you average up, average down or go all in, do you scale out of trade or exit all at one time. what is the goal? how much time can you devote? what do you do if your pc or connection goes down in the middle of a trade? how often do you take money out of the account?

these are just some of the things you have to know each and every time you push that little button that initiates a trade.

[tradergirl]

Hi, trading strategies differ for every trader. Therefore using someone elses strategy is probably the worst thing you can do because it may not match your personality, goals, risk profile etc etc. You may want to visit xxxxxx to see how you can build a strategy that will give you your own, unique edge.

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[darthtrader2.0]

Originally Posted by MC »

No set of indicators or basic system could ever give you that. IMO Discretionary with MP and VSA and any other mix of things to tune you into market sentiment and then systematic execution on your interpretation is the way to be timeless and profit from the market forever.

There is a great quote from John von Neumann that applies to this. "Precisely describe to me what it is a machine can not do and I will make it do exactly that".
To me the issue with retail auto trading is people are taking what discretionary traders are using(fibs, MP, patterns, candles, whatever), automate the simple patterns, curve fit the data, run it live and pray you get lucky that these simple patterns match up with the present market conditions. All the time not thinking about that what makes a successfull discretionary trader is the catalog of patterns in their brain for making decissions under uncertainty while the simple indicators are just a way of filter out some of the noise. Sure you don't need many conditionals/lines of code for the simple indicators but there is no way to emulate human decission making without getting extremely complex.