TraderWill

I agree with the previous two posters. Renko charts give you a very clean indication of trend, support/resistance and congestion. Volume is also extremely useful if you're simply looking at a naked chart. There's a thread here that focuses on volume price analysis that you may find helpful. I'd add one more element, and ties in with the comment on doing your homework before the session starts, and that is to also take a look at your markets on a higher time frame. Going to a daily or even weekly chart will help you gauge the markets trendiness or degree of consolidation, and that will make it easier for you to decide whether you'll take breakouts of S/R or fade them. I'll be looking forward to hearing how you progress with your strategy. Good luck.

The performance report shows that your average losing trade is ten times larger than your average winning trade, so a 90% win rate is basically keeping you even. Of course once you figure in the commissions and slippage on all of those trades you're just digging a hole for yourself. You may want to revisit the strategy or look for a new one. As others have said I'd suggest a strategy that has fewer trades each day and also one that has winning and losing trades more similar in size. That way if you can come up with a 60% - 70% win rate you'll do a whole lot better than with the strategy you showed us. I'd steer away from a system that gives the performance you showed us. Good luck

Those are great results, and you've been doing well for the past several weeks with the same approach. Sounds like you're ready to trade live. Start small, one contract, and let your account grow before increasing size. Try to keep your risk to about 1% to 2% of your total account size for each trade, that'll help you survive the inevitable strings of losses. And keep us posted on your progress. Good luck.

I think we do trade to make money, but TheNegotiator makes an excellent point about the right mental attitude going into any individual trade. Assuming that you have a system that's been back tested and yields positive results over a longer timeframe, then you should approach each trade with a neutral expectation as to whether it will be a winning trade or a losing trade. You will have winners and losers in any system. But your focus has to be on excecuting your trade according to your trade plan, which is based on your back test results. Know where the entry should be, where the target and stop will go, and trade accordingly. Don't deviate or improvise. Good luck.

Great post, you're off to a good start in your trading. I'd also add that when you start trading with real money you want to limit the risk you take on each trade. Know what your maximum loss will be, where you put your initial loss. And make sure that you're not risking more than 1% to 2% of your account on any individual trade. That way even if you get 5 or 10 losing trades in a row your account will survive. And although it sounds like a lot, if you have a system that wins 2/3 of the time then statistically you should expect a 10 trade losing streak once or twice a year. Keeping your risk small will allow you to recover from these drawdowns. Good luck.

Hi quad, if you're using technical analysis on your charts then one approach you can use for targeting is to measure the most recent price move, wait for a retracement, and when the trend resumes (if it does), set your target for the same size move. Good luck.

Hi Jim, I don't know what the GBPJPY prediction is based on, but there are some smart people out there and it could well be correct. I looked at the weekly chart for the pair and on that chart you can see that it's been moving sideways for about two years now, after a big drop in 2008. Matter of fact since September '09 and now it's been stuck between 125 and 150. Eventually price will break out of this range, but I wouldn't predict in which direction. I'd wait for the break to happen and then look for an opportunity to get on board the new trend. Good luck.

I second (or third) Technical Analysis by John Murphy and Trading in the Zone by Mark Douglas. And for a more in depth look at technical analysis, Trading Systems and Methods by Perry J. Kaufman (this one is for us geeks).

Tams is correct, in Tradestation you can manually draw the trendlines and have your code take certain actions whenever it interacts with the trendlines. You can also specify different actions to take depending on the color or style (solid, dashed, etc) of the trendline. So definitely doable. Good luck

Hello Feng, You do have to spend a lot more than two hours to learn EasyLanguage programming. Let me try to help you understand this code a little better. First, open the Tradestation Help and in the search tab put in swingHighBar. That'll give you a page that explains what this function does exactly, and what the different input parameters mean. Essentially it'll give you the bar number for the swing high. H[2] means the high of two bars ago, it does not mean that the high is 2. Numbers or variables inside square brackets tell you how many bars ago to reference. Your question about the if - the code is checking if the most recent swing high is lower than the prior highest swing level, which I believe is then used by the program to determine that the uptrend is over. You really need to commit to spending more time learning EasyLanguage, there are simply no shortcuts to that. And I fear you may be setting yourself up for a hard time in the markets if you think all you need is some free trading strategy and a couple of hours time to get started. Buckle down and invest the time to learn, start with the simple code examples in the Tradestation tutorials, write your own simple strategy and test it out, do some demo trading, and if after all of that you think that you have a winning strategy, then go ahead and trade real money. And be prepared to deal with losing trades because they will come and are an unavoidable element of trading. Good luck in your studies.

Hi Feng, If you have specific questions about the code it'd be easier to answer, as the previous posts state. This appears to be Tradestation code and if you have that charting platform you could just run it and see what it does. I think it looks for lower highs to indicate that an uptrend is over and a downtrend beginning and then gives a setup to go short the market. And conversely looks for higher lows to indicate the end of a downtrend and beginning of a reversal. The variables are used to store values calculated by and used in the code. The numbers next to the variables are default values to initialize the code but will be changed as the code is executed on each price bar. Not sure if this helps, if you can narrow down your question it may be easier to answer. Tradestation by the way has extensive documentation about coding in their help file and in the help file reference section there's a link to downloaded their coding tutorial pdf document. You should download it and go through it as it does a great job of teaching how to program in their platform. It explains the use of inputs, variables, logic structures, etc. Some of the commands in the code are actually programmed functions and if you look their name up in the Tradestation help you'll find an explanation of what they do and how to use them. Good luck in your studies.

Hi Sandra, If you've traded before you can probably do a web search to come up with a few suggestions. Fading the opening gap is a popular technique that is based on the belief that most opening gaps will be filled, but I don't personally know the specific rules on how to do it. If you haven't traded before then you'll want to get some general background on technical analysis, which you can probably get by reading a few books from your local library or bookstore. Any market open strategies will make more sense to you if you have the technical analysis background. Good luck

I just ran into this thread today. Are you trading live now or still paper/demo trading JohnnyCakes? Looks like you've settled on a set of indicators that work for you, that's great. You made an earlier post about cutting back on the number of trades you take. That's something I do in my own trading, if I have a strong start with a couple of easy winners then I call it a day. And I limit the total time I spend trading, so even on choppy sessions the damage will be limited. Good luck in your trading, you're doing the right thing by starting slow and paper trading before using real money.

I find the best trading for index futures is typically in the first 30 - 45 minutes after the open. If the early session is choppy however then 11am EST often sees some nice breakout moves. I wonder if anyone else has noticed this. Regards.

feng, if you want to look at historical data use the continuous contract, which for the S&P is @ES. This is not a real contract that you can trade but an artificial contract that combines all the front month contracts. If you want to test the Russell use @TF, for Dow @YM and for Nasdaq @NQ. Good luck in your testing.