Tradewinds

As far as free news sources go, my personal preference is Forex Factory: Forex Factory They release the news very fast; within seconds of it coming out. I feel that the display format that Forex Factory uses makes it easy to get a overview of the news very quickly. There is one downside though, they focus on what affects currencies, and leave out a few things that Bloomberg does not. Bloomberg includes retail sales information for example, that Forex Factory doesn't. Bloomberg also has a "Market Focus" detail that might be helpful. Economic Calendar - Bloomberg If you wanted to pay money for a news source, but get it the very second it comes out, you could get a subscription to Trade The News. https://tradethenews.com/ If you have the money to spend, fine, but if you don't, then wait until you have your trading skills and strategy worked out.

You need a strategy, based on the following four phases: 1) Discovery 2) Rule Creation 3) Testing and Refinement 4) Implementation The "Discovery" phase includes looking at charts, looking for patterns, asking why price behaves the way it does, coming up with theories for price behavior, and making some general conclusion about how probable it is that price will behave a certain way under certain conditions. In the overnight hours, there are no market internals to guide you. There are no scheduled U.S. news releases or U.S. earnings reports. So speculation on the next days news is probably a substantial input to why the overnight market does what it does. You could develop a strategy based on speculation about tomorrows news. You could try to enter at price extremes, hoping that price will retrace back towards the center. You could buy highs, or sell lows, hoping that the price will go even higher or even lower. You could speculate on gap fill probabilities. Are you awake and watching the ES overnight? Are you going to place orders ahead of time to be filled? Are you going to enter and order and hold it going into the next day? All of these factors need to be part of your strategy. Sometimes price goes to an extreme and then retraces. Sometimes price goes to an extreme, and never retraces, it continues even more. How are you going to deal with those situations? If you are in a loosing trade do you stop and reverse, or just take the loss?

Let's look at the objective of trading, and then work backwards. The objective is to determine when the trend is going to reverse. That's the objective. Yes the objective is to make money, but you can't do that unless you are on the winning side of the price move. So, . . . can tick charts provide a better indication of when the price is reversing? My opinion is, it all depends on how you read and interpret the information, and how your indicators and/or programs process the data. The classic example I would like to give, is a long tail on a candlestick or a bar. What does a long tail on a candlestick of a bar mean? It means that the price surged very quickly, but failed to maintain that new level. On a shorter time frame chart. you may not see the long tail on the candlestick or bar. You may see a gap from one bar to the next. So the way you would interpret and process that information is different. On a longer time frame chart, you will see the long tail, on a shorter time frame chart, you won't see the long tail. Both situations are giving you the same information, but it's displayed differently, and must be interpreted and processed differently. Therefore, what I'm saying is this; it all depends on how you, your indicators and your programs process, filter and interpret the data. People process information in different ways. I can look at a chart and have a different perspective than someone else. The bottom line is, what works for you. I stopped using very fast tick charts because, FOR ME, it's information overload. FOR ME, it's more confusion than a help. FOR ME, it takes my focus away from the longer, real trend and makes me focus on noise. Focusing on noise is bad. So, FOR ME, I prefer a 1 minute chart compared to a 133 tick chart. As for different aggregation periods, I don't use them, so I'm only giving my opinion in regards to a very specific situation; 1 minute charts vs. 133 tick chart.

I would say that it is an issue of WHAT controls the market, not WHO. It may seem like I'm splitting hairs here, . . . I am. To use the word "who" controls the market, automatically excludes some other factors that influence the market; like earnings, or economic reports. Those are not "who" factors. All I'm saying, is that if you want to understand the influences on the market, then there are a few things you need to look at, not only buying and selling. For example, let's say that a lot of investors made a really stupid decision, and then realize they are on the wrong side of the trade. How are you going to know that? I don't think there is any way of knowing that. You will see the consequences of it, after the fact. But if all you look at is buying and selling, and the people who are doing the buying and selling made a really stupid decision, and you follow them, that's not a good situation. Sometimes the market influences that are affecting price get it wrong. That's why the market will see a "flash crash" when unexpectedly bad news comes out. The market influences got it wrong. What I'm saying is, that buying and selling influences on the price, and the fair price of the market isn't always right. And if you follow the herd that is wrong, the price will correct at some point, and it could do it in a matter of seconds. I'm just trying to provide some thoughts here in hopes of providing a few more pieces to the puzzle. I don't know the whole picture myself. I'm not saying that I understand all the market influences myself. But news and earnings affects the price, and speculation and hedging affects the price. I don't think it's just pure buying and selling.

Unless some fundamental changes happen in the intent and desire of human beings, no law or attempted enforcement of any law will change the ultimate destiny of the human race. Human beings are inherently flawed when it comes to working together for the ultimate good. Human beings have about the same mentality as a pack of wolves, or a tribal system; maybe on a larger scale, but that is the current state of the human condition. So things like social programs, types of government, economic systems, rules of law and enforcement of those laws can be debated for eternity, but nothing will ever change until and unless the intent and desire of human beings changes from the "wolf pack" mentality to the "greater good". So my answer to the question of, "If you could change one thing in the world, what would it be?"; is for the intent and desire of human beings to strive for and pursue the greater good, and to perpetuate this ultimate good into the future indefinitely. Human beings are weak willed when it comes to foregoing personal gain at the imbalanced expense of others. There will always be expenses that must be realized in order to profit; and expenses and profit are not inherently bad. What is bad is usury, exploitation, neglect and abuse. But unfortunately, all those bad things are done every day for someone else's personal gain. Every nation of the world has perpetrated it's share of exploitation and usury in it's attempt to gain standing and power. Any nation can only attain success from a certain degree of character, moral values, orderly social behavior and goodwill. Look at U.S. history for example, which is full of wild, violent, immoral and destructive behavior, but enough people were willing to take the behavioral "high road", that things formerly turned out well for the U.S.of A. Unless the U.S. and the world has enough individuals making the right personal choices, and collectively "tipping the scales" toward what is constructive for our future, then the world will continue in it's current self inflicted suffering.

If I get what I consider to be a high probability peak or bottom set up, I will always trust that FIRST signal ENOUGH, to enter, but won't trust it enough to stay in very long. So I will immediately scalp a profit right after the FIRST reversal entry. I should explain something about how I trade for this to make any sense. A lot of people wait for confirmation that a trend is already underway, then look for a little bit of a pull back or retracement to enter. I do that also, but I don't wait for my FIRST reversal entry to do that. My FIRST reversal attempt is before there is any confirmation that a trend has reversed. I will go long as price is still going down, and vice-versa. Some people might call that, "trying to catch a falling knife". I don't see it that way. But there is always the chance that I'm wrong. But the reward is great enough for me to make, the attempt. The market is a RISK/REWARD relationship. You take a bigger risk, you get a bigger reward. Of course, we would need to go into a long discussion about what risk really is in order to do that topic justice, but the topic here is why I, personally, would scalp a trade as opposed to letting it ride. Basically, I'm scalping the first reversal attempt before I have any confirmation that it's really a reversal. That's why I would scalp. If it really is a reversal, fine, then I'll just do what everybody else does, and RE-enter a SECOND time on the next price pull back. But the difference is, I've already made a few bucks and they haven't. And if the price really isn't going to reverse, that's fine also, I made a couple bucks off the bounce. So either way, I'm a few dollars ahead of the game. But the real issue here is whether I have a good leading signal for a price reversal. I think I do. But if you don't have a good leading indicator, then it's just a gamble to try to go long as price is falling. Oh, and I have no predetermined targets or stops. Please don't misunderstand, I have targets and stops, and they get set, but not until after the trade is underway and I've analyzed what the situation is. I'm not trying to sell my tactics or convince anyone to do what I do. I'm just explaining a little bit of my strategy.

I think the results you are getting are great. Have you traded different market conditions? It's possible to get great results for a period of time if the way you trade happens to coincidentally match market conditions. It can happen that a person gets great results under certain market conditions, then gets killed if the market changes, and you don't adapt. You didn't mention anything about what you use to make your trading decisions. Do you trade through the news? Have you ever got caught on the wrong side of a trade when price has a flash drop? How do your results from trading the ES compare to your trading success in the past?

Here are subject categories that I use. This provides an outline for structuring my trading plan. The goal is to have an answer for every subject category. Trend Categories: PRE-MAJOR REVERSAL MAJOR REVERSAL RETRACEMENT REVERSAL CONFIRMATION REVERSAL FAILURE TREND CONTINUATION POSSIBLE REACTIONS TO MARKET CONDITIONS: STOP AND REVERSE AVERAGE-IN SCALP LET IT RIDE TAKE LOSS TAKE PROFIT RE-ENTER IN CURRENT TREND DIRECTION

I'm not saying that I have a solution to the problem, but I can write about what I'm doing. I've written hundreds of notes down, written strategies, and struggled with trying to apply rules to actually trading. It's not easy. I've come up with a couple of conclusions. Rules are good and they are bad. I have experienced situations where my rules made me inflexible, and caused me to mindlessly ignore the reality of the present situation. So I realized that I need to have a balance. I need something that allows me to be flexible, and deal with the situation at hand; but I also need guidelines for recognizing high probability set ups. So instead of rules like: When line X crosses line Y and indicator Z is greater than value V, then buy, I am putting together basic concepts that can generically be applied to all sorts of situations. Instead of the basis of my trading being rules based on hard values, like, indicator XYZ crossing zero, I'm looking at basic concepts. Those concepts are things like Higher highs, Lower Low's, Failure to make a Higher high, a higher high, but it was very weak, weakness, strength, success, failure, confirmation, lack of confirmation, divergence and convergence. Those generic concepts can be applied to any combination of indicators, news, information, and price. I have come up with rules to determine things like whether there was confirmation of a trend reversal, or not. So I'm applying concepts to the indicators. I used to look at indicators without analyzing them within the terms of those generic concepts. It's a different mentality to look at an indicator and say to yourself, "This is showing signs of weakness and failing to continue", rather than thinking, "This indicator just crossed the zero line, . . . that's a signal." I think those two situations are two totally different perspectives. I have found that the more generic I get, the more flexibility is automatically programmed into my rules. But a combination of things are happening for me. I have decided on the indicators that I trust and that I know give me good information. I have trimmed down my charts and indicators to just a handful of things that I can focus on. But that has taken me almost 2 years to get to this point. You must put the hours in. So what's my point? Your question seemed to be about emotions and sticking to your rules. I believe that you can't stick to your rules and control your emotions unless you really know that your strategy works. I'm getting there slowly, but it's been a long road. I have written many, many pages of notes and observations and rules, and thrown them all away. But it's a process that was necessary to get to where I am now. Currently I'm at the point where I feel like I'm getting some really solid rules that I can now start practicing over and over until I develop a discipline. That's a whole other level. I get easily bored, and distracted while trading. And I tend to stop analyzing the situation and just waiting for the price to move in my direction and stop thinking about what is going on. I think of it as practicing something like learning an instrument. Just do the same things over and over again until it's committed to memory.

If you learn something valuable, you will have that for the rest of your life. Most people who succeed, keep on going after a couple of failures. Here is something else to think about; if you take no risk, and just live an average or below average life, then, to some degree you have already lost. For people who find success and money easily, it may mean nothing to them. So even though they have success and/or money, it may be a meaningless life. Any psychological factors that a person deals with are probably related to issues other than success or failure in trading. Sure, success or failure in trading could make your emotional/psychological state worse or better, but it's probably not the real cause of a person's issues. Personally, I have tried making things work, at a time in my life when I wasn't in a state that allowed me to have success. But, you can't wait for the perfect situation either. There needs to be some kind of balance. Don't be insane. :doh: In other words, if something doesn't work, do not keep doing it over and over again. If you take some losses, take some time to figure out what went wrong. The cash balance in your practice account should be steadily going up in value before you go live. Try to write down trading rules, and a trading plan. You will probably abandoned your rules and scrap them, but keep writing them down. It's a process. You must go through the process.

If you can find someone who believes in your ability to make money trading and is willing to invest the money, you will need to do something other than borrow the money from them. That's my opinion. If you borrow the money, then put the money in an account, who's name is the account going to be under? Who is going to be responsible for any taxes, fees and expenses? How is the person who loans you the money going to report a gain if you make money? What if you loose all their money? What if you make a huge amount of money, but most of it goes to the person you borrowed the money from? There are a lot of questions. If you are operating from the U.S. you can set up a Limited Liability Company (LLC). With an LLC there must be at least 2 members. Each of the members are owners. Each member owns a certain percentage of the company, and is entitled to a certain percentage of the profit based upon their ownership. The LLC does not get taxed. Each owner is responsible for their own part of the income. There must be a manager and a secretary to the LLC. The LLC can also have employee's. If someone else puts up most of the capital, you could create an agreement, that you would get paid for your trading expertise. Because as part owner, you wouldn't get much of the profit, as an owner with a very small percentage of the ownership. You can buy a book that explains what you need to know about an LLC. You will need to open a checking account and a brokerage account in the name of the LLC. There will be a fee to create the LLC with the state. You must get a Employer Identification Number from the IRS. If you hire an accounting firm to set all of this up for you, it will cost you more money than you currently have in your account. So, the person you get to invest in the company with you would probably need to fund that also. I would not borrow the money. That's my main point. Don't borrow the money. If you want to set up a legitimate business, then do it that way. And have people invest in the company, understanding the risks.

There are various possible motivations for people making a post to the forum. I make posts for a combination of reasons; some selfish, some less selfish. My selfish reasons are to get an ego boost for myself if someone gets some value out of what I provided. Another reason is to mentally "work through" ideas. Bad ideas will hopefully get filtered out and discarded. Good ideas will hopefully become actively present at the forefront of my consciousness decision making. Another part of me hopes for an ideal world where people actually have goodwill towards each other and understand, that what benefits the greater good will benefit each of us personally. But that doesn't make much sense in the context of trading, which is hardly a goodwill industry. What if someone shares a great idea that helps a rotten, scumbag person make a million dollars? And the bad person uses the money for bad things. What if I shared a great chart setup and strategy that became so well known, and used, that the markets had to change because so many people where taking so much money out of the system, that the system would collapse? So the deeper a person looks into the dynamics and truths that are at the very core of the market, the more you might realize how dark that black hole is. So what is this forum for? It's a confused mix of the good and bad, trying to work itself out. It's cooperation, but only to a certain degree. If by chance, I created the world's best trading strategy, I probably wouldn't tell anyone about it. And I doubt I'd have the time to make a post to this forum. I'd be busy doing other things. So I guess I'm confessing that I haven't achieved much success. That's not easy to admit, especially in the greed and ego driven world of trading. Maybe honesty will get me somewhere someday. :frustrated:

My internet protection software blocked that site when I clicked on the link. I have no idea why, or whether it's justified or not. But that's what happened.

Thank you for sharing your experiences. I'm using the TICK together with price trend, and the ADVN-DECN trend. Plus I'm keeping track of higher highs and lower lows on the TICK. I don't really pay that much attention to the level of the TICK readings. I think that it's all relative. I think of the TICK as being a mini trend within a larger trend. That "mini-trend" doesn't tell you what the major price extremes are. Signals for the major price extremes come from the ADVN-DECN. It's the same thing as using an anchor chart with a long Moving Average, and then a chart with a faster MA, and waiting for both the short and fast to confirm a top or bottom.

ES Morning analysis Nov. 1, 2010 Es 11-1-10 - Traders Laboratory - Professional Traders Community

And I'm guilty of that myself. Getting hyped up about doing something that seems like a great idea, and then realizing that it's work. :frustrated: But, it wouldn't be much work to download the trades from my platform, then upload a .csv file to a database in the group. My trades are logged automatically in my trading platform, and I can export the data. That way there would be no real data entry. Just data exporting, importing. And that data would be an objective way for people to decide whether what I'm doing is hype or real.

You could create a blog, and post your trading journal there instead of the forum. I wish Traders Laboratory had a database tool, for logging data, posting profit/loss, and calculating win/loss rate and rate of return.

I agree. The worse thing that can happen, is that your stop losses become "loss targets". Which can easily happen if the stop loss is not being adjusted, or we just ignore the signs that a mistake was made. When I start thinking to myself, "I would like to cut my losses at X", then bad things happen. If I accept that I just need to take the loss now, and deal with it, then I usually minimize the pain. Actually I shouldn't be thinking of it in terms of pain or profit. That's when logic ceases to operate. If I'm trying to keep track of how much money I'm making or loosing, or whether I'm feeling good or bad about the current situation, then it interferes with my ability to make a decision. That's the psychological and emotional side of the stop loss decision.

STOP LOSSES Questions that must be answered when writing your trading rules What if your stop is the perfect entry point in direction of your original order? In other words you got stopped out at exactly the wrong place; your original trend analyis was correct, just slightly off. Your original trend analysis would have been correct in most instances, but this is one of those times when the price continues past a typical reversal or continuation point. In this case, averaging in would be better than getting stopped out at a loss. But how do you know the difference? Is this dangerous? How much risk should I increase? How much should a person average in? Should you increase your position to the maximum in order to offset the original loss? What if your stop loss is the price you should reverse at? Even if your entry is totally wrong, should you average in, looking for a slight bounce in the right direction to minimize you losses? To deal with all of these questions, you must define what a total break down of an entry signal is, and what a slight misjudgment in the entry signal is. Determining what factors affect a trend reversal or continuation is critical. News is an obvious and typical influence on price and indicators. I have never seen an indicator that can retrieve, analyze and interpret the news for you. That is one influence that could invalidate a typically good trade entry signal. Every person uses different trade set ups and different indicators, so you must determine for yourself what causes a failure of an otherwise good trade signal. The determining factors are probably very subtle, and difficult to notice in a timely manner. One example is a very fast and substantial price move. A surge in price can come at the beginning of a trend, or at the end of a trend, or at the continuation of a trend. So if a price surge happens, which one of those three is it? How does that affect your stop, and your decision to reverse, or reenter an order in the previous direction? This is something you need to determine in your trading rules. If people have ideas and/or experiences about what the specific answers are for your trade rules and indicators, please post them.

I also watch accumulated volume. Sometimes the /ES turns when the accumulated volume starts to turn or has a bump in it. It happens regularly enough, so that it's worth looking at. The uvol/dvol is of less use, but I still watch it. uvol/dvol often is out of sync with the the advance/decline line, and the price of the ES follows the the advance/decline line. The TICK often leads price by quite a lot. Because the TICK is very choppy and just looks like a jumbled mess on a chart, it is difficult to figure out the patterns. But the TICK does have patterns, it does trend, and it is the best leading indicator that I know of.

We all need an objective way to make a decision. There are techniques you can use to do that. One simple way is to list a bunch of possible choices on a piece of paper. Then narrow those choices down to the 3 best ones. Put each choice in a column, so that you can compare strengths and weaknesses of each choice, side by side. Then try to quantify best and worst case scenarios. Of course, time can either be your friend or enemy in this case. And you may have already made your decision by the time this post is made. If the best answer causes you more short term pain. Then you need a pain management strategy. There is pain that comes from something killing you, or pain that comes from you getting better. Which pain is it? The pain comes from fear. Is it the kind of fear that protects you from danger, or is it the kind of fear that just eats you alive? Fear isn't necessarily bad if it keeps you from taking more risk than you can handle. Is that fear worth fighting, and something you need to work through? Can you conquer it? If you take the loss, can you make the money back sooner than waiting for the price to come back. I think that is one of the most important questions you need in your list. You must consider "opportunity costs". Opportunity cost - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

My ex-wife became a broker with Edward Jones. The office failed after 2 years. I agree with Mighty Mouse, that it is all about sales. Being a broker is not necessarily going to make you a good investor or a good trader. Sure, you will have resources available to you, and you will learn a lot about the industry. But you won't learn anything about trading. As a broker, you will need to be able to execute trades, but that won't make you a trader. To be successful either way you go, you need time and money. 90% to 94% of all traders fail. My opinion is, that you need about 3 years and enough money to get you through those 3 years. It's not that people are not capable of being brokers or traders, but most of them run out of time and money before they reach success. If you can get a broker to sponsor you, and you pass your licensing test, it might not be a bad experience no matter what happens. If you do become a broker, location is everything. You must be able to integrate with the community and relate to them very closely. There is a failure rate and a certain amount of risk in anything we do. Do what fits you and what you like doing.

Interesting, I hadn't heard of that before. I've heard people say that they don't try to fade the gap if, for example, the ES has gapped more than 10 points. There are days when the gap doesn't fill. My opinion is, that you can make a judgment about that according to how unexpected the news was. If there was an extremely positive news surprise for example, and UVOL is just screaming up, then I wouldn't try to fad the gap up.

ES End of Day Commentary 10-20-10 - Traders Laboratory - Professional Traders Community

I don't know what percentage of the time it works. I don't have extensive data with statistically proven numbers within a certain deviation error as backup proof. Do I need that before I make a post? I'm new here, so I just want to make sure. My apologizes to everyone in the group if I have provided misleading and useless information that does more harm than good. It's really cool what you did with the big red letters. Can you teach me how to do that? Maybe I can figure it out on my own.