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<b>Indicators are just summaries of the underlying behavior of market participants.</b> Like the 30-second news segment on CNBC, they do not tell the whole story, they can be misleading, but they are often better than nothing and they do save time. Some traders like indicators because they cut...

Actually chaos theory is ultimately inadequate to explain the markets, although its a better model than coin-tossing randomness. Chaos occurs in systems with nonlinear feedback -- in particular systems with positive feedback that cause amplification of small perturbations of the system. A...

If you are intrigued by TradeTones and want to delve deeper into how sound might help you see patterns in the market, get the book "Auditory Display" from the Santa Fe Institute (its an academic book with a fun CD of examples) . Also, Mathematica has built-in tools for "displaying" a data...

Read "Fooled by Randomness" by Nassim Taleb for an excellent discussion of the non-psychological reasons why traders don't make money. See: http://www.invest-store.com/cgi-bin/elitetrader-bin/redir.cgi?moreinfo.cgi?item=17319 Happy trading, Traden4Alpha

Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! You're getting a bit harsh on yourself. (and taking away the jobs of all those ETers that get their jollies from trashing other people :) ) Not having added to, scaled in, blah blah blah does not make you a bad trader UNLESS your system would be more profitable or less risky...

Here is a qualitative description of the tweaks that you could make to your system to improve trading. All of these tweaks involve changes in the win:loss probabilities and gains. In each case, the key is to see if the trade-off between the changing the probability of winning or losing is...

How does one distinguish between the traders that are trading on hope from those that are trading on something more than hope? It seems like there are daytraders that are trading on hope too -- hope that the emotional tone and trend of the market won't reverse after entering an order. Why...

<b>Emotions are Short-lived</b> Although emotions certainly do drive the market, they tend to operate on a short-term basis. Fear cannot last forever, eventually the price of the tradeable is driven to an excessively low level and bargain hunters (like bignatty and myself) step in and buy...

Regardless of how stupid the reg is, there is a way around it. What stops the brokers from offering 1-hour settlement or 1-minute settlement or instantaneous settlement? Isn't the 3-day rule just the regulatory max? Is there a minimum settlement time???? Seems like it might be a new...

OK, I did not make myself very clear on that one. Made me realize there are two different types of erroneous exit situations. <b>Erroneous Exit #1: Simple Premature Exit</b> Say you enter a long position (we could repeat the example with short positions, too). Your long position has...

What about the flip-side error -- an erroneous exit. Do you immediately re-enter the position to maintain discipline? Or do you blow your plan, and just accept what ever P&L the market gave you with that mistake?

I like aphie. Yes, he has been posting prolifically of late, but most of it has been very informative (such as sharing his recent work and thoughts on better ways to track trading action). Moreover, both he and GG post interesting questions about trading, TA, strategy development, etc...

aphie, <b>RE: 1,452 trades with an average win ratio of 0% and an average loss per trade of .25 (the spread)</b> LOL! Sounds like you found the Holy Grail system for the broker. Hmmm.... maybe some less-than honest Prop Firm will buy your system to give to their chumps.. errr ummmm I'm mean...

aphie, <b>Cool graphs!</b> Have you tried taking a 500-bar EMA on the first data set (the first differences of the 200-msec price averages) and overlaying that EMA (multiplied by 500) on to the second graph (the 500-bar differences). Looking at your second graph...

rs7, Sorry to hear that you had such a disappointing experience. It sounds like trading with such a strict loss-cutoff risk management policy is quite hard/unpleasant to do, whether those limits are imposed by a firm or are imposed by oneself. I wonder if some scheme for budgeting...

aphie, One issue, with high-speed trading is the total cycle time from the market, through the data service, over the internet to your PC, through you trading system, back over the internet to the broker, and back to the market. Even if the trading system makes decisions instantaneously...

<b>Cool idea, but expand the formulas and see what you really have here:</b> Its always a good idea to expand and combine the mathematical formulas for what you are doing. Often you discover that your effective formula is much simpler than you thought when a bunch of terms cancel out. This...

<b>Confidence intervals on averages</b> The T3 MA bands raise an important point about any statistical approach to MA. In admitting that noise corrupts the data measurements of price, one must admit that some of that noise will be present in any calculated average. This noise is attenuated by...

BTW, if you do buy DeMark's book go to: http://www.invest-store.com/cgi-bin/elitetrader-bin/redir.cgi?moreinfo.cgi?item=5712 You'll be supporting ET and I hope that we can all agree that that is a good thing.

On the one hand, I agree that recent retail investors will probably avoid buy-n-hold like the plague for the next 5, 10, maybe forever years. By the time they feel comfortable returning to the market, these baby-boomers will be so old that they will be looking for fixed-income investments...