[bootstrap]

Here is something that should get pretty lively..

Since everyone keeps telling you that screen time is important, there has to be something to it. But nobody is telling you what you should be looking for. What is it going to teach you? There has to be something that those who do this for a living see that you don’t.

Well there is. And just like the magician that exposed the secrets to magic tricks on national TV, I am going to tell you what we see.

But before I do remember one thing. Take everything you read in a forum or book, or hear from a guru or in a seminar with a grain of salt. Question everything. Only when you prove it to yourself, does it become the rule.

What I am about to share can be found on thousands of sites and in countless books. If you have done any research at all, you have come across Dr. Elder’s triple screen, or some permutation of it. You understand the principles behind using multiple frames of reference. What has most likely not been explained to you is why it works or how to apply it correctly. In most cases you are only given a single example.

Single example you say? Yes, when most first stumble across using multiple time frames, they follow the rules of:

Use the upper time frame to identify the trend, the middle time frame for the set-up, and the lowest time frame to enter.

If by chance you are not familiar with the triple screen just goggle “triple screen +elder”.

Trading instruments exhibt three different types of market action in any given frame of reference. You use multiple frames of reference (i.e. Time or ticks) to identify the current market environment. These markets are: Trending, Trading, and Volatile.

Why screen time is so important is that all instruments do not exhibit the characteristics of Trending in the upper time frame, Trading in the middle, and Volatile in the lower at all times. They can be in any one of the following combinations at any given time:

Trending/Trading/Volatile
Trending/Volatile/Trading
Trading/Volatile/Trending
Trading/Trending/Volatile
Volatile/Trending/Trading
Volatile/Trading/Trending

Or any one of 84 possible market combinations if you consider Volatile/Volatile/Volatile.

Like the major pairs in Forex, the combinations I listed are what I consider the major market combinations.

The elusive secret that you are looking for, and what screen time teaches you, is to identify which market combination you are in and then how to trade what you see. Or better yet, when to stay on the sidelines. Each combination requires a different strategy, and some may not be tradeable at all. If you are trading across a broad range of instruments, you only need to master one. The fewer instruments you trade, the more market combinations you may have to learn. But you have to learn them one at a time and only add the next one once the first is mastered.

But you ask what about Trending/Trending/Trading? Or how about Volatile/Volatile/Volatile? Or if I use Weekly/Daily/Hourly I get Trending/Trading/Volatile but if I use Daily/Hourly/Min I get Trading/Volatile/Trending.

One step at a time grasshopper. One step at a time. As I mentioned there are 84 possible combinations. Multiply this across thousands of instruments and countless frames of reference, and I hope you get the picture. You do not have to learn them all.

You only have to learn the few that fit you, your chosen instrument and frames of reference. Find the market combinations that are most prevalent and learn to trade only those. This is why it takes screen time to learn to do this, and why each trader is different. It is also why three traders in the same instrument will be doing something different. Trader A will scalp, trader B will be a buyer, and trader C will be seller, and they all make money.

They are using different frames of reference and therefore see a different market

[metalhead]

It's like if someone wants to become a better fighter, they have to spend time fighting. Reading books about how to escape from a triangle choke is cool and all but in order to be able to do it effectively you have to actually do it.

[Sledge]

Bootstrap-
What a post.... again! Every time I see that you have started a thread, I run to it and listen to what you have to say today. I'd like to thank you for your refreshing, open and honest insight on this vast arena that we all attempt to play in on a daily basis.

Your posts are always succinct, well thought out, and beautifully presented. You are providing a wonderful outpouring of information for any trader smart enough to listen to it and take it to heart (and implement it into their edge.)

I envision your posts will become the type that a newbie trader may read it here, write it off, and in 6 months will flock back to the web in a panic to find your words once again. The posts have a way of sticking, and hopefully they'll re-discover them again (or maybe they will bookmark them now in their gathering and find them again in their bookmark list)

When I read a post like this, I smile, because I have been through this very part of the forest at one point in my trading career and it resonates with me. It is a very important step in "lifting the veil" for anyone who plans to do this long-term and it makes some stellar points!

You do hear the battle cry of "Screen time, Screen time, Screen time!!" but bringing up a spark to folks to say "Hey yeah, that makes sense" Just looking at it and hoping it clicks isn't enough for most.

I have read countless people who make the analogy that getting your trading education is no less as intense and as hard of work as becoming a doctor, lawyer or any other profession. The analogy is true-- but at least becoming a professional "whatever" you go to a structured school, their is a well defined path that you are made to take (certain classes, partake in certain "real world" exercises to assist you in your learning.) Where trading- their is no such "school” What is out there is an internet of, literally, hundreds of thousands of indicators, trading "guru's", shady brokers, black box systems, holy grail pushers. Everyone says that it is "Up to YOU" as a trader to make it. This is indeed the very definition of the "School of Hard Knocks!"

Along the way- if you are lucky, you run across people who cut the B.S. and give it to you straight (if you are willing to listen.) You also may be so lucky as to have the initiative and perseverance to not only refuse to give up when this horse throws you- but also take the "bucking" as a learning experience. Your will to "tame this stallion" becomes a goal, a hard fought goal that reaps rewards beyond your dreams- if you can stick with it and not get taken to the cleaners while you are learning.

Regards,
Aaron

[zdo]

"The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer." Edward R. Murrow

Bootstrap, hope I’m not taking the thread in a direction you would not prefer, but your’s and Sledge’s excellent comments reminded me of some thoughts I had garnered re screentime that may be helpful to noobs.

This paragraph is mostly about quantity of screentime. After the curious ‘playing around with it stage’ for a beginner, the quantity of screentime needs to really accelerate. “Let us begin with a straightforward hypothesis that emerges from recent research: There is a core set of characteristics that distinguish the greatest participants in any field of endeavor—including trading. … In “Greatness: Who Makes History and Why”, Professor Dean Keith Simonton points out that mastery of any domain requires approximately 50,000 “chunks” of information and skills. This applies across different fields, from chess and sports to scientific research. To acquire such a wealth of experience and data, the accomplished individual needs to be able to sustain focused attention on work for considerable periods. One of the most important factors distinguishing successful people from unsuccessful ones is the ability to become immersed in work—to become so focused on the task at hand that all self-consciousness is lost. In this state of cognitive focus, the successful person can process information deeply and efficiently. It is as if they enter a state of super-learning, mastering complex skills and material far more readily than the average person…How can people sustain such a focus for a length of time? The psychologist Mihalyi Czikszentmihalyi has found that this is possible because the creative person enters a pleasurable emotional state—a state of flow—when immersed in effortful activity. This intrinsic pleasure enables achievers to weather periods of uncertainty and discouragement on the way to success. All of us have experienced flow states at one time or another: when we get ‘into the zone’ on a basketball court or during trading, when we are absorbed in sexual activity or a stimulating discussion. People achieving the highly focused flow state typically lose track of time and stop thinking about personal plans and problems. It is as if they and their efforts become one.” from Brett Steenbarger article NewPsychiologyOfException alAchievement. If after a month or so of screentime that’s not happening for noobie – s/he should probably look into another game.

This paragraph is about quality of screentime. In his latest book, Steenbarger also emphasizes the importance of deliberative practice. “The essence of deliberative practice is what I call the learning loop. A learning loop is an attempted performance, followed by specific feedback about the success/failure of the performance, followed by renewed efforts that incorporate the feedback…If done correctly, a log will reveal patterns. Patterns of what you're doing right and what you're doing wrong and when and how often and under what circumstances”. paraphrasing Steenbarger in ETP
“Contrary to the advertisements common in the popular media, trading expertise is not a function of possessing a superior indicator, mind-set, or chart pattern. Expert traders process market information differently from nonexperts, cultivating sophisticated mental maps that enable them to eliminate irrelevant information and implicitly process the patterns amid the market noise. Armed with such maps, expert traders respond more rapidly, confidently, and accurately to market events than do nonexperts.” also from Steenbarger in ETP.
Noob’s see – http://www.traderslaboratory.com/for...ks-3435-2.html





“We don’t see things as they are. We see them as we are” Anis Anin

[Sledge]

Originally Posted by zdo »

from Brett Steenbarger article NewPsychiologyOfException alAchievement. If after a month or so of screentime that’s not happening for noobie – s/he should probably look into another game.

This is really the only part of the discussion I'd disagree with. Anyone who thinks that you can be a master chart reader and master any of these markets with a month of screentime is crazy. Whether the statement comes from Steenbarger or not-- that is bunk!

Also remember that there are different groupings of people as far as learning capacity. I'll give you an example:

Student A:
In my years of academia, I always had people in my classes who had a natural "gift" to pick up information and comprehend the most complex subjects. They were the people who came to class on the first day, made it to class for exams and, at times, never even bought books. And these individuals did very well. They aced the classes-- to them, the subject matter came easy. It was almost "too easy" and it bored them to sit in class 2 or 3 days a week- they had other things to do.

Student B:
Enter a different kind of student. One who did well in courses- but had to be in class every day, had to ask lots of questions of the professor. Days before exams- they were pouring over notes of lectures, they were studying, repeating, trying to make connections of the material with something they could grasp so they would remember how to answer the question on the exam.

Which person was the better student?

Both students aced exams- but one had to work very hard at it, the other- it was easy. I was and always have been a "Student B" many things never came "easy" for me, I ALWAYS had to work for them, I always had to take the hard times, the frustrating times and fight through them- because the end result was that I was to garnish my degree- just like the "Student A" did.

Do I wish that I had it easy? Sure!
Do I wish I could honestly look at a chart and after a month say "Ahh hell I got this all figured out" and begin to bankroll millions of dollars? Well yeah, that would be nice too.

But I refused to give up- My gumption, my desire, my REFUSAL to be defeated made me who I am in every aspect of my life today. Many many times in my years have people told me that "Ahh, you can't do that" and I'm the bugger who does it to spite them. The natural desire to succeed is there-but the idea that someone actually believes that I cannot do said thing- makes me want it even more!

So for the "Student B's" out there- remember this: If you want this bad enough- it can be yours. This will be no different than anything in your life you have lived thus far.
Aaron

[Head2k]

Originally Posted by Sledge »

This is really the only part of the discussion I'd disagree with. Anyone who thinks that you can be a master chart reader and master any of these markets with a month of screentime is crazy. Whether the statement comes from Steenbarger or not-- that is bunk!
Aaron

I heaven't read anything from that author but I guess he doesn't say that after a month you should be a master of markets. He says that after a month you should experience the state "there is only the screen and me" or something like that.

[zdo]

Sledge,

re:

Originally Posted by Sledge »

This is really the only part of the discussion I'd disagree with. Anyone who thinks that you can be a master chart reader and master any of these markets with a month of screentime is crazy. Whether the statement comes from Steenbarger or not-- that is bunk!

So for the "Student B's" out there- remember this: If you want this bad enough- it can be yours. This will be no different than anything in your life you have lived thus far.
Aaron

"If after a month or so of screentime that’s not happening for noobie – s/he should probably look into another game.
" was my statement and I think you missed the point. 'that' was referring to immersion not expertise. Hopefully you only 'refused to give up' on activities that expressed your gifts and had long term meaning and purpose for you from within. If a Student B noob doesn't have that drive from within to the point where immersion is occurring quite naturally - then s/he should acknowledge that early and walk away.

More Steenbarger (after not thinking about his stuff for months, seems I got it on the brain today )
"Many are called, few are chosen – I believe the implicit learning perspective helps to explain why so few traders ultimately succeed at their craft. Quite simply, they cannot outlast their learning curves. If, indeed, it takes thousands of trials to generate successful implicit learning, a great number of traders would have been bankrupted by then. Many others might not survive that number of trials simply due to the time and energy required. It is impossible to hold a full-time job and generate the degree of immersion in the markets needed for implicit learning. On the other hand, it is impossible to obtain a full-time income from trading without developing the mastery conferred by years of experience. Part-time traders never develop expertise for the same reason that part-time chess players or athletes are unlikely to succeed. For purely practical reasons associated with raising a family, making a living, etc., few people can undergo the “starving artist” phase of skill-building. "

And btw, there are no Student A's on this or any other trading forum. This is strictly a conversation between us Student B's

[zdo]

Here is a little bit more from Steenbarger supporting quality screen time.

“…implicit learning research suggests that much of the expertise we acquire is the result of processes that are neither conscious nor intentional… It appears that much repetition is needed before implicit learning can occur… The implicit learning research suggests a provocative hypothesis: Perhaps expertise in trading is akin to expertise in psychotherapy. While therapists say their work is grounded in research and makes use of theory-based techniques, the actual factors that account for positive results are implicit, and acquired over the course of years of working with patients. Similarly, traders may attribute their results to the research or patterns they are trading. In reality, however, the research and patterns serve as rationales that legitimize the absorption of markets over a period of years. It is the implicit learning of markets across thousands of “trials” that makes for expertise, not necessarily the conscious strategies that traders profess… There are many ways of becoming immersed in the markets: through research, observation of charts, tape reading, etc. The specific activity is less important than the immersion. We become experts in trading in the same way that subjects learned Reber’s artificial grammars. We see enough examples under sufficient conditions of attention and concentration that we become able to intuit the underlying patterns. In an important sense, we learn to feel our market knowledge before we become able to verbalize it. While simply “going with your feelings” is generally a recipe for trading disaster, I believe it is also the case that our emotions and “gut” feelings can be important sources of market information.

The reason for this is tied up in the neurobiology of the brain. In his excellent text The Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes and the Civilized Mind, New York University’s Elkhonon Goldberg summarizes evidence that suggests a division of labor for the hemispheres of our brains. Our right, nonverbal hemispheres become activated when we encounter novel stimuli and information. Our left, verbal hemispheres are more active in processing routine knowledge and situations. When we first encounter new situations, as in the markets, we tend to process the information non-verbally—which means implicitly. Only when we have made these patterns highly familiar will there be a transfer to left hemisphere processing and an ability to capture, in words, some of the complexity of one’s understandings. As we know from studies of regional cerebral blood flow, the right hemisphere is also activated under emotional conditions. It is not surprising that our awareness of novel patterns, whether in artificial grammars or in markets, would appear as felt tendencies rather than as verbalized rules… So finally we get to the traditional domain of the trading psychologist! How do we know when our feelings convey real information for trading and when they merely provide interference from our conflicts over success/failure, risk/safety, etc.? Developing trading expertise is not so simple as following such slogans as “tune out your emotions when you are trading”. Much of what you might know about the markets may take the form of implicit knowledge that is encoded nonverbally and experienced viscerally… the key ingredient in trading development may be the immersion, not the research or the patterns per se. If this is true, efforts to find the best trading system or the most promising chart pattern are off the mark. The what of learning trading may be less important than the how… I believe the most exciting frontier for trading psychology is the development of tools and techniques for maximizing implicit learning processes. Such techniques would assist in the acquisition and utilization of expertise by training individuals to sustain states of consciousness in which they are open to implicit processing. As I hope to demonstrate more thoroughly in my forthcoming book, there are reasons for believing that experienced traders possess greater expertise than they are aware of. This tacit knowledge, to use Michael Polanyi’s memorable term, reveals itself during “hot streaks” in trading and those wonderful experiences where we just “know” what the market is doing and place winning trades accordingly. Too many traders look to emulate others. The secret to success, conversely, might well be to gain greater access to the expertise we have already acquired implicitly and learn to become the traders we already are when we’re at our best."
From the article Learning to Trade: The Psychology of Expertise by
Brett N. Steenbarger, Ph.D.




“You shape your brain and then your brain shapes you” Of unknown origin and of questionable accuracy