SpideySense

Evidenced based is excellent. OK. Your book, which has a lot of words, spends quite few of them on Jungian Archetypes and you also refer to Carol's book. All of which make a Spider's senses tingle very unpleasantly. All the research I've done puts Jung's archetypes in the skeptic beware territory. Its a little like the old I'm Ok Your Ok followers who found they had parents, adults, and children. And I see a touch of it in the pro-course posts on this thread. Where is the evidence base for the Jungian Archetype part of your prescription?

There is a discussion going on about: ssds - good, and even on sata2 reduce access times (rather than bulk file transfer) wifi - to be avoided ram and cpu - as fast as possible while staying off the bleeding/expensive edge But nothing being said would account for 10-60 second delays. I suspect that shooly has his system screwed up in some way completely unrelated to hardware speeds. Perhaps reinstalling at least the trading software but preferably the whole OS would be a good idea. Note that I use Sierra Chart (which I abandoned NT for many versions ago) so I don't know how the timer works ... is Tams right in that if the OP isn't getting any ticks for 60 seconds the timer will sit and do nothing (poor timer design)?

It seems to me that the real issue is that the OP quoted 10-60 seconds delay. That's not a computer hardware slowness issue; that's something wrong with your setup, probably the software. No hardware slowness is going to result in more than fractions of a second unless something else is going very wrong.

"Learning how to lose, so that you learn from your mistakes, is the biggest lesson you'll ever learn in becoming a successful trader. You have to become very comfortable with losing because if you trade, you are going to lose. And if you don't learn from losing -- then you continue losing. This is how you manage risk." You might want to imprint those sentences into your memory circuits. As with so many such statements this one is useful but far from complete. It seems to imply that you should learn from each loss. But that would push the novice towards one of his greatest mistakes --- continually trying to fix each trade or series of trades that loses and thus chasing systems or system perfection. The reality is that losses within the system are just losses. And there is little to learn from them except, should you not yet have it, the ability to lose without pain. Only excessive mistakes, or losses that show some underlying change in the market/strategy fit need to be learned from by the trader. These are a couple of the lessons that Demming and statistical process control bought to the car industry - identify whether the process is ok or not before you try to fix everything; and don't blame the worker, improve the process. The trader above fixed something that was repeatedly messing with his process. It is doubtful that he was trying to fix every losing trade as implied by "And if you don't learn from losing -- then you continue losing."

Capitalism is about life and death; success and failure. Look at the new product growth cycle with large numbers of companies jumping on mid cycle then failing when things tighten up. Its a good thing. Trying to fix capitalism by bailing companies out ... that's the bad thing. Trying to fix capitalism by regulating the wrong things ... that's stupid as well. Capitalism ... productive but not always pretty. Democracy ... not as bad as the alternatives. Prison ... the right place for a number of finance industry execs.

I'll give them points for right. YOU ARE A PLANNING TRADER You tend to be decisive and to the point. You can spot logical inefficiencies in the market easily and take advantage of them, especially if you are pointed in the right direction. You enjoy long-term planning and goal setting and seem to enjoy learning, expanding your knowledge and staying well-informed. One of Your Trading Strengths - You could probably generate a trading business plan and trading systems quite easily and naturally. One of Your Trading Challenges - You may not honor your stops because you want to be right about your trades

I often wonder about what people reveal by the language they use. With those whose second language is English then most things can and should be excused. A higher degree, which one assumes was awarded by a serious educational institution, would suggest that one had a command of the language. I think there is a lot revealed by this paragraph.

That's generalizing a lot (all the time). Most research that's messed with is done for financial gain. So the classic example is research to justify a drug's efficacy. And everyone seems to be getting better at spotting that one. The other classic is where someone has strong ego in it or some psuedo-moral belief and the research that 1000s of often ignorant but frequently anti-scientific families have used to justify not vaccinating their children is the supposed link that was shown between vaccinations and autism. Result article withdrawn and I believe the researcher struck off but semi-hippy new age communities don't know and thus have reduced herd immunity to key childhood diseases. In each case science is the solution. Science demands peer review and that research be repeatable. So, while newspapers swing from one side to the other, scientists test and retest hypothesis's to determine the currently most valid theory. And testing offices are also a good idea though especially where financial interests or strong political/religious/ego interests might be involved. Falsifiability is what makes science good - and progress possible. Anyone notice the recent experiment showing neutrinos travelling from Switzerland to mid Italy faster than the speed of light. If it proves true and repeatable it might invalidate special relativity and perhaps make time travel possible. Very cool. But the thing about science (as opposed to politics or religion) is that it will be tested, and tested hard. In the end we'll get an improvement in current knowledge.

I think its a good question. Most of the books out there add little to our knowledge so checking if at least one person thinks it's good is sensible - its not the price of the book necessarily; we also have to invest the time to read it. Lovely city Oslo; I was a little disappointed by Copenhagen but Oslo was as clean and beautiful as a European Capital deserves to be.

Yeah; I liked it too. Steve's wit can be a little acerbic at times.

Good post Solfest. Steve's was even better but you get the credit for spurring him on anyway. The three steps to an edge are very important with step two an important way of minimizing data mining errors. I don't get quite as many data points as Steve but have always put any new idea through the back test then forward test (paper). Its surprising how often the forward test reveals issues that need to be resolved for a really effective edge. Finally the points about discipline and taking each trade are absolutely critical - without them your edge is grass. A couple of useful books that aren't in the normal trader's set for anyone wanting to deal with discipline issues are: - The Practicing Mind Bringing Discipline and Focus into Your Life by Thomas Sterner. Its surprising how a book by a musician / piano tuner can relate to the processes and practice that is trading. - You Are Not Your Brain by Jeffrey Schwartz generalizes the treatment of OCD to face up to the problems that traders seem to experience turning Mark Douglas's (yes read his books too) prescription into reality. and - Your Brain at Work by David Rock which overlaps elements of You Are Not Your Brain in a way that is very relevant to the design and execution of good trading processes. The second and third books deal with learning and neuroplasticity without the new agey psychobabble pseudoscience that seems to be adopted by some of the people bringing it to the trading community.

I've been a Sierra Chart user since about version 35. I've also suggested it to a few other people. Siuya's comment about complexity is a good one but need not be important to the adopter. There are two issues with SC: one is that it does a lot of things a little differently to other platforms so if you were on another platform do expect that for a few weeks you may get "huh ... thats weird .. I expected it to work that way" feelings but you will get past that before your first month is up. Second is that it has enormous potential complexity: but in this case its like when you first met word or excel or open office and there were so many things it could do. What you do is do what you need to do and then gradually add to it. The support board is very good. I've never had a phone call to SC in 8 years; and they normally answer board questions by the evening you ask them. They can be a bit blunt at times and do appreciate if you keep questions short. But they do answer them and they will make a prerelease half a day later to resolve an issue. There are 10+ times as many prereleases as releases. The software is modular and prereleases almost never have issues in areas other than the thing being changed at present but its probably still wise for newbies to stay with the release version rather than install every prerelease. Also, many don't even bother to stay up to date with releases. It is a great program. Very flexible. Very capable. Cheap. And a lot of contributions from other users on the support board. You can develop your systems on it or you can use it to export data and information to something like R and use R to do system development and testing before handing your operational management back to SC.

There are some good posts here on tick volume, particularly zdo's one. I'm not sure that two points are clear enough: - tick "volume" is from a source and if the source is a broker then the it represents people in their market place so not only is it a subset of the total but it is likely to be skewed to their customers (losers?) - the futures markets are very small compared with the total of forex trading so they may also be unrepresentative of what is really happening and may be distorted by manipulation to drag the currency market. So basically its the old issues of garbage in garbage out ... and understand the limitations of your tools. I'd be very careful to qualify the extra edge tick volume offered - our eyes frequently deceive us.

Sure is an interesting choice of word Thales. I point it out because I try to think in probabilities. So I would "know" that there was a, say, 75% probability that exceeding a point by x ticks would result in a significantly larger pullback and thus I should exit. For me, that might define "sure." On the other hand, I hate trailing stops anyway.