Kiwi

I have the birdwatching ebook and would support the view that it is one way to take on the markets. Not my chosen way but I could make it work if I liked it a bit more IMHO a nice way to deal with the euro is to trend trade it although when I was doing it I was trading the european morning and then taking the rest of the day off. The US morning could also be trendy as long as the news at 8:30 didn't hammer it with too big a shock ... big shocks often leave the bell ringing and make day trading trends a poor choice. If you do want to day trade the euro trends then a method of buying pull backs in the trend (I used to use 5 minute bars for my base timeframe) will work. The "Floor Traders Method" which is free from NQoos site worked well for me. You can find it for free here: Trade Setups for trading futures, stocks, options...NQoos

Price action is watching what price does (or maybe price with volume) and judging your trades based on that. Usually without indicators or maybe support and resistance indicators like: emas volume profiles market profile lines thru significant prior highs and lows

Torero, Its really simple. Anyone who arrives and dumps website addresses is a spammer. After 10 posts that aren't commercials someone could make such representations ... but until then their throats should be ceremonially cut and their heads pegged up on the city gates as a warning to similar scum. IMHO

wrleenh is a spammer. Beware. A friend of mine bought his letters and that was only the entry price. The real price was all the losing trades. Like all spammers he can't trade, can't design systems and just takes people for a ride to spammer generated hell. Don't be a fool like my friend and get sucked in ... stay away from these scum!

wrleenh is a spammer. Beware. A friend of mine bought his letters and that was only the entry price. The real price was all the losing trades. Like all spammers he can't trade, can't design systems and just takes people for a ride to spammer generated hell. Don't be a fool like my friend and get sucked in ... stay away from these scum!

I used to use these. The german site gives events a ranking. Forexnews.com Translated version of http://www.derivatecheck.de/termine/default.asp

Buy the cheapest computer you can ($300?) and get your software moved onto it. Or spend a couple of hundred more and buy something much more powerful than your old machine.

You can't count on anything. During the night the ES and EYM will follow the asian markets a little (nk particularly) and the european markets more strongly (estx50 and dax). If major news occurs then they will react to that news. You either trade while awake or adjust your position size and strategies and trade overnight as well. IMO

It smells like spam ... and its russian ... I guess it fulfils someone's dreams. If anyone wants to take this up let me know and I'll send you an email from your rich Nigerian uncle.

Mines a 2.4Ghz ... I wonder ... can you dual boot windows onto a mac platform so that you could use windows for trading and macOS for everything else? I don't mean that you should run a windows simulator ... I meant real dual booting of XP as an alternative.

What's a Mac? Or more correctly why would one use it for trading (My team used to have a Lisa so I have apple history). I love my WinXP 2G E6600 Core2Duo setup with TWS, ZLT and SierraChart

The Well Planned Trade It's not whether you win or lose but how you play the game. This old adage is especially relevant to trading. Many novice traders assume that winning is the only thing that matters, but what they soon find out is that profiting over the long-term requires discipline and trading well developed trading plans. Sure, you can capitalize on chance and make a few winning trades here and there, but you can only win in the long run by developing a trading plan and following it. It is important to distinguish justified wins from unjustified wins. A justified win is when a trader makes a very detailed trading plan and follows the plan. A win that results from following a trading plan is justified and reinforces discipline. An unjustified win occurs when a trader doesn't make a plan or drifts from the plan. He or she may be rewarded, but the outcome occurred by chance. The win is unjustified and can reinforce undisciplined trading. For example, suppose you go long on a stock, expecting it to go up $1, but it went down. If you followed your plan, you might close the trade. Suppose out of frustration, though, you hold out and hope against hope that the trade will turn around. Now suppose that it does, and you end up profiting. You have ended up with a profit, but you may have reinforced an impulsive trading style. You might think that profits are all that matter. "All is well that ends well," right? Well, maybe not. You may make a big profit, but at what psychological cost? Unexpected wins may provide short-term pleasure, but they can adversely influence discipline in the long term. Rather than developing a well-defined trading plan, following it, and getting rewarded by trading it, a trader puts on a trade haphazardly and is coincidently rewarded. In this case, a lack of discipline is rewarded, and this unjustified reward may increase a trader's tendency to abandon trading plans in the future because he or she has been rewarded for doing so in the past. However, the positive outcomes are usually short-lived, and a lack of discipline ultimately produces trading losses. Cultivating discipline is vital for consistent and profitable trading. One implements proven trading strategies, over and over, so that across a series of trades, the strategies work enough to produce an overall profit. It's like making shot after shot on the basketball court so as to accumulate a winning number of points. The more shots you take, the more likely you will amass points. But the winning player is the person who first develops the skill to make the shot consistently, so that at every possible opportunity, the ball is likely to go through the basket. To a great extent, consistency is key. If the player uses one approach one time, and a different approach at another time, performance is haphazard. It's the same for trading. One must trade consistently, following a specific trading plan on each and every single trade. This allows the law of averages to work in your favor, so that across the series of trades, you will make an overall profit. If you follow the plan sometimes and abandon it at other times, you throw off the probabilities. Suppose you used a strategy that had a track record of 80%. Under the best-case scenario, you could only expect to win 80% of the time. But since history doesn't always repeat itself, it's likely that you will win less than 80% of the time. If you don't execute the trading strategy the same way each time, you will decrease your winning odds. And fewer winning trades may mean an overall loss. That's why discipline is so important. With discipline comes profitability. Don't let unjustified wins interfere with your ability to maintain discipline. Follow your trading plan, and reinforce the idea that if you follow your plan, you will end up with profits in the long run. If you abandon your trading plan, and get an unjustified win, you may feel good in the short term, but you'll pay a long term price when it comes to your ability to maintain discipline. So clearly define your trades, and stick with your trading plan. The justified wins you receive from following your plan with help you develop an unwavering pattern of disciplined trading. from Innerworth.com

I dont rate by dollars at all. I rate every trade with 3 numbers (1 is a break of my rules, 2 is slightly faulty, 3 is as it should be). The first number is for the entry. The second for the stop. The third for managed exit. So a great trade is 333. A very bad trade has a 1 in it. Anything to do with money takes your focus away from where it should be. Use money measures for weekly reviews etc (IMHO)

100% technical. Read momentum, structure, and behaviour at critical points. The only value of news is not to enter immediately before it - wait for either a reaction to trader or wait until the news induced noise leaves the market so you can get back to doing your normal thing.

If you want something outside of trading you might try http://www.buddhanet.net/pdf_file/livngmed.pdf

I have found that one of the best things I can do is to repeatedly ask these questions: What does the next signal have to look like & how will I take it? What's the exit look like: what's the target zone and how will I trail stops?"

I would note a few things in addition to the valuable information at the top: 1) Non US rollovers are often different. Last trading day of the (monthly) HSI futures contract is the day before the last business day of the month. Volume almost always stays with the front month until the morning of the last trading day so you trade December right up to opening on the day before the last business day of December - 28/12/2006 2) Most longer term futures traders rollover when volume moves from the current front month to the new one. This day is often not the same day as the day that the exchange forces rollover --- you just watch volume and when you see its now higher you move. This is made more complex if your volume reporting is 1 day late :-) 3) If you change the rollover dates from the ones you tested your system on you will be surprised how huge the change in profitability can be!

I'm in Oz and didn't enjoy trading in the evening (Euro and European futures). Add to that an absolute abhorrence of trading after midnight so I needed something in Asia. When I started the SGXNK wasn't available so I decided to try the HSI. Eventually it stopped taking money and started returning some so its my market now. Also, it has the best hours of anything ... 11:45 to 14:30 for the initial session and then 16:30 until news and drinks time for the second session.

My wife and eldest daughter describe me as a futures trader. Thats defined as someone who spends a few hours a day trading the Hong Kong markets (sounds cool to Aussies apparently) over the internet and makes a lot more money than the wife. My youngest daughter describes me as unemployed, useless or a bum, depending on her mood. She's 16 so that's as good as it gets currently.

Its not bad that more people try or that more people fail. Out of those potential failures will come the smaller number that succeed

This is a very good observation ... the something new and shiny problem. Forget addiction to trading; my addiction is new shiny things, and every one of them damages my trading while I think about it. I am still (and maybe never will be) disciplined enough to stick 100% with my method when I have a new idea floating around in my head.

If you had an account with $10,000 in it you could trade 2 HSI contracts for a realistic return (if you are trading well) of $1,000 per day on about 10 trades. So thats 10% per day. HSI is thin though so scaling up is the issue. The other challenge is consistently trading well (that's actually the real challenge).

This reminds me of when i went long QQQ at the opening of 2000 ... It was about 3 days before it stopped going down

Sorry, I forgot to answer the original question. Nice to see your agreement Torero, I had read a number of your posts and found myself nodding while reading so I suspect our market views are not dissimilar. 1. Elements of technical analysis are reinforced because other traders believe in them. Examples are most forms of support and resistance including prior swings, mas and fib ratios. So the more users then the more support there will be - but this doesn't say that the original observations, study and testing were wrong just that reinforcement helps. 2. Elements of technical analysis are damaged because other traders believe it it - sooner or later people figure out what the failure of a particular ta style looks like and will either fade the style, build on the failure or both. You see this with market profile enthusiasts who will perhaps short resistance at the hva but if it fails will jump on long to ride the failure. Failures can be some of the very best trades. Good TAs use both success and failure structures to their advantage as often as possible. So things work both ways. The key for a trader is (IMHO) to take some ideas that appeal to them, observe them in real time, test them, build trading rules, test them, and then make some money. Then over time you expect that the two factors above (and others) will distort market behaviours so you will need to evolve slowly (maybe you just have to have 1pt bigger stops this year than last year) or quickly if market character varies dramatically to continue to be profitable. I trade HSI and adjust my trading slightly every day ... some days my standard stops will work perfectly. Other days they don't but by watching the first few trades I can tell whether the day will be characterized by larger retracements or not (if it is I buy further back from my signal and put my stop further back as well). That's Technical Analysis in Action (and Evolution in Action).

1. This argument seems to be off the rails because: You guys are incorrectly defining technical analysis. The simplest definition of TA in trading is to trade based on what happens Price and Volume alone. That is you exclude fundamentals, the stars, what your dog did yesterday and tips. It doesn't have to mean patterns, it doesn't have to be linear, it basically differentiates price/volume based decisions from fundamental analysis. So, buying support and resistance, using market profile, using volume at bid vs ask analysis and using indicators or patterns are all examples of technical analysis. Choosing targets, analysing MFEs and MAEs to determine stops and targets, points for tightening stops and determining RR of potential trades are all Technical Analysis. 2. Jerry is right that most traders are losers at any one time (some climb out of it) but its not because of TA. Most traders are losers because their brains are wired wrong. A trader may know what to do (semantic memory) but do the wrong thing repeatedly (procedural memory). It doesn't require FA, TA or any analysis at all ---- most traders will be losers just because 3. It is true that market price doesn't have a normal distribution but that doesn't prevent approximations to nds from being effective (otherwise why bother with market profile?) But other than market profile and statistical work most of technical analysis doesn't care what the distribution is - it doesn't give a flying xxxk! Most TA that works with trends benefits from the fat tail distribution - we get an unreasonable number of long moves! Most TA that works with edges also doesn't care. TA is based on crude robust statistical assumptions and doesn't assume a distribution. And one of the differences between a long term winning trader and a burning star is that, rather than expect the distributions to stay the same, they adapt when the markets actions change in such a way that their method slips out of alignment. If TA is useless then by definition Market Profile is useless! TA (making trading decisions based on price and volume analysis) works for those that can make it work. I can't make MP work. Soultrader couldn't make patterns work. But that doesn't mean they don't work, it usually means we didn't do the work or get the teaching to make them work. It might also mean our brains have been wired incorrectly. But, TA can work for those that can make it work. That's my 2c