timokrates

Here are mine... 23 is the halfway point underneath... Spend a long night with ranges and potential entries. Very inspiring. Did not generate a whole plan. But...well...we'll see. Happy to be here and learn. In general I seem to suffer the Kelly Bundy syndrom. For every information that gets in another one is leaving the brain...

Frightening how exact the call was... But to really trading the range - even it is wide enough - one has to enter nearly at the extremes without "confirmation"? Yep. But that's what makes reversals challenging. 1003: Not difficult to "make calls" if one has done the prep. 1007: It seems to be marginal, but why did you chose 44 as the upper limit as the PDH was 45 and the overnight high was 43? Eyeballed it. Exactitude isn't absolutely necessary. The point is to know what a range looks like. The market will tell you eventually what the exact range is. 1022: So as the short is underway now. One could switch to the 5M, watch the right tick and wait for 20...? Depends on your stop. Price never really gained any traction. 1042: True, 30 was obviously it for now. And the stop was hit at BE 37.50 - without proper trade management I would like to add. But 30 was the low of my 15M range...so... What I ask myself by plotting these ranges: If one sees that a potential midpoint has been meaningful before, can one use it to find the "right" extremes? Does this makes sense? This is something that has to be determined by the individual. I don't want people trading the way I trade since everyone's risk tolerance is different. To begin: 1. What is your entry trigger going to be? How far away from the range bottom or last swing low is it going to be? How far does it have to be in order to ensure that there is actual intent of a move down and not just a little tick burp? 2. What is your stop going to be, whether hard or mental? How much recoil are you willing to tolerate before it becomes clear that the trade is no good? 3. If the trade does appear to be working, how far does it have to go before you can think about BE and relax into management mode? All this can be tested and has to be tested in order for you to be able to relax. How many? 50 or 100, however many it takes so that you have something in which you have confidence. It takes no time at all to do this. A couple of evenings maybe. Add: When you do the reviews, you'll find little "tells" that telegraph intent. For example, when price dropped out of the range, it futzed around for three minutes. This is not unusual since so many are surprised by the move. And then it resumed the downmove. However, it then stopped again and began to retrace its steps. This is not good and should not happen. If the move is genuine, all the thinking should have been finished. That it isn't suggests that traders aren't as committed to the downside as one might have thought. And for whatever reason, they decided to return to the "value area". Thanks a lot DB. Due to whatever reasons I use to get distracted and stuck in the testing process. So thanks again for showing the path. What you mentioned in terms of the breakout of the range is noted. Very good. I suppose that it can be viewed in the same context as one wants to buyers to be eager to pay the ask or here the other way around - a clean and fast move at the end.

Means short term traders attract "investors" by driving price to "their" levels? And only they are able to make a difference at that points - also because short term traders are in & out? So only at these points change is supposed to happen? It's much what I was saying last week. That as the 1m trader moves into territory that is traded by the 5m or 15m trader, a different dynamic can take place. And when they all get to a level that matters to the daily trader, the dynamic can change significantly. It's not so much a matter of "investors" but of different groups of traders with different objectives.

Here is my perspective. The range and hinge on the 15M are my favourites :-)

You mean the shortcut discussion, personal preference etc.? What you said was pretty much on the point I believe and includes simply what it takes. So thanks for that and all the info you shared over the years. And..your conclusion might be right, I'm that type of guy - but not too young anymore...

DBPhoenix, do you still use the TICKQ in your trading? As by the "Trading in 90 minutes" thread it seems that you solely rely on price - and the previously defined levels. No TICK, no volume. Is that correct? Thanks..!

Thanks AgeKay, Is this basically a combination of point & figure and VAP? Very interesting, would be great if you could post a pic of it.

I agree with you AgeKay in terms of price/volume relationship. How do you track the volume at the levels (bid ask studies, T&S?).

AgeKay, it would be interesting, how you use the volume to find meaningful S/R levels. I mean high volume areas are pretty obvious, but from my experience price levels can be more exact. Would be nice to hear opinions on that in general.

Yes, using the period of the movement to split the distributions is what he meant as far as I understand. Yes, for FESX I use the whole day, which ends 22:00 our time (Spain/Germany).

Hi dsalas, a very good question I believe. I have the same problem trading the 6E. The best way I found so far is to split it into the different sessions (Frankfurt/New York/Tokio). I asked Tom (Electroniclocal), who is a seasoned MP trader this question and he answered that one should look for movement away from value to split the distributions in an objective manor. For me this is still difficult, but I have to say that using MP the way I do improved my trading a lot. He recommended to toggle the different letters to see, which one contained the movement. I believe for ES and FESX (EuroStoxx) it's not that hard, because they usually have a narrower range I would say. The Stoxx in general.

You are unfair. The knowledge presented in the blog made me a better trader, that's for sure.

Thanks for this thread and your other work as well. Over the last weeks I tried to get deeper into everything, but I'm still maybe only at a level of an advanced beginner. Your comment above lead me to ask you about confirmation in general. From what I destilled from your posts specially in this thread I believed that you try to enter your trades from a one tick chart as close to a predefined level as possible. The problem entering without any "confirmation", only with a TICK divergence from my experience so far often caused trouble. Even with a huge divergence forming I often saw price grinding through the level travelling to the next. The problem of course also is, what could "confirmation" be? The entry below/above a bar, springboard or level in general? Don't get me wrong, I know that this all is never a hundred percent and is a puzzle of understanding - which I like, but which also contains some mental dynamite. For me the order (or the plan) how you analyze the market and the (short term) swings and levels would be interesting. Apart from the discretionary aspect involved, how do you put the puzzle of levels, price, volume and market breath together in realtime?

Maybe this is a stupid question, but what would be the confirmation in case of the long trade? A higher high? I found the tape reading aspect interesting. Does anybody use this tool for exits or even entries?

Hi all, I'm trying to find out if it's necessary to upgrade my 2MBit DSL connection to avoid latency in case of order transmission or price updates in general. Is there a way to monitor the used bandwith in a meaningful way? Does it make sense to ping servers? I'm trading through AMP Global (IB to Open E Cry) and use Sierra for charting. I'm trading short term with tick and volume charts.

I'm not sure what you are refering to, but I was not able to find the apprpriate tool there. Even the custom statistics report is not helpful. Is there a way to customize this a bit more.

A report about some stats like win loss ratio / average winner/loser would be nice. Ninjatrader for example offers these features.

Thanks, I believe that I tested it out so far, but the problem of the trailing stop for example is that (obviously) it would move the stop according to the parameters set. What I need is a strategy with a build in breakeven stop, which I afterwards would like to trail discretionary. This option I did not found so far.

A simple breakeven function would be nice. Maybe I did not figure it out yet, but as far as I can see there is only the possibility of a manual move to BE by clicking the button (which creates an extra order - no OCO?) or to use the trailing stop function. What I want is just an function that moves the stop to BE (+1) after x amount of ticks in my favor.

I use a software called AntiVir. It's free and does the job very well I believe. Only the daily auto update is a bit annoying http://free-av.com/ This software should be more common in german speaking countries, don't know if this is very popular elsewhere.

I'm also looking for a new trading PC. My favorite is currently a shuttle XPC, does anybody has any experiences with these barebones? In regards to the monitor I found this new Samsung 2263 DX. It comes with an attached 7" display. This could be useful for traders I believe. http://news.softpedia.com/news/Samsung-039-s-2263DX-22-inch-Display-Comes-With-7-inch-Siamese-Brother-76071.shtml Any comments?

Great post, thanks HLM! What would you call a high probability setup? Confluence of S/R (even on different timeframes) with the trend?

Time & Sales and a Market Replay function would be nice...

We don't have to talk about stops here, this is essential, but you have to be fast and when you see big orders comming in against you, you have to be quick and get out - even with one tick...

Another point could be the tick/point value. If you are a very short term trader and you scale out or exit on a discretionary basis, then making 1 tick in the ES would mean that you are still profitable, assuming $5 commissions...