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What a gracious poster you are, abattia. Nice of you to thank everyone for their input. Tell me (if it's not premature), out of the many wildly disparate points of view recorded in this thread, does any particular approach, or any synthesis thereof, seem viable for your trading? Thanks...

Hi Goonior, Yes, I'm interested in automating the whole trading process. I use Sierra Chart right now, and they have us code our entire systems with Excel. It's a real pain, and I don't care for it much, but I'm accustomed to the platform and like it for charting and for the numerous...

Thanks guys, Those are brilliant ideas. Should be interesting programming that stuff in Excel. Steven

I am new to automating systems and was wondering if anyone could share any tips on integrating "divergence" into an automated trading methodology. The appearance of divergence may not be sufficient to warrant a trade for me, but it is one of the factors I like to take into consideration...

Hi again, I'm just against the pessimism of some folks here. Hell no, it's not easy to make money trading. As someone who's been at it seriously over 12 years now, I've certainly lost my fair share and have only somewhat recently achieved enough consistent success doing this to be able to...

This is of course the key question. If it were possible to tell when a market trends and when it chops, making a killing would be plum easy. I would stay away from the choppy markets altogether and use a volatility-based trend indicator to trade with the trend. Works so well in a trending...

Like so many of the contributors on this forum, you take a pessimistic viewpoint on the various main stream paths to trading, Most everything is bull to you, whether it's indicators, support and resistance, trading advisory services and gurus, and even paper trading. You go on to offer the...

Hi, Can anyone here explain what the Damiani Volatmeter is? I know it is supposed to act as a filter against choppy markets: when a certain line crosses above another line, one has the green light to trade, as trendability is sufficiently high, otherwise, one does not take any trade signals...

Yes, time charts can serve as a self-fulfilling prophecy, as fseitun implies. If everyone is looking at the same charts and acting on them accordingly, that should impact a market. On the other hand, it seems to me that trading on the basis of a chart that everyone is using is the very...

John F. Carter of __Mastering the Trade__ says 0.5% a day is a reasonable, manageable goal. I assume he is basing that value off the results of the systems he describes in that book. I'm shooting for 2%, but it's too early to tell if I'm going to be able to achieve that consistently using my...

By buying ATM LEAPS, you get higher than 50 delta (like about 65 or so) and the bid/ask spread is satisfactory. That's one way to get better odds of success without getting gouged on the spread. The gamma is lower than near term options, though, so you won't see the kind of exponential growth...

Is there any particular insight that time charts have to offer that isn't included in tick, range, and volume charts? I use tick, volume, and range charts in tandem, comparing the same market from the slightly different perspective of each chart. My quandary is whether or not to integrate time...

Right now, you can get in on a free trial going on for a little less than 2 weeks still at tradersaudio.com for the grains. The username is grains and the password is squawk. They have Vic Lespinasse doing the broadcast. So far, I haven't found it quite as useful as the S&P squawk, but it's...

I'll have to check out the EMD. Thanks for the tip, Diviersions. I imagine it might offer just the right amount of volatility, being a mid-cap index contract.

In his Method I system, a volatility breakout strategy, Bollinger say to enter a trade when the bands expand from their tightest squeeze, i.e., lowest Bollinger Band bandwidth, in six months. Unfortunately, he never seems to say what kind of chart he's using. Should we enter following the...

You have to think it might all be random when you consider the silly correlations between irrelevant events and the stock market, such as whether the Yankees win the World Series. When they win, the market goes up by 10% on average the next year, and when they lose it goes down 13%. Now, what...

I really like Gary Smith's book, __How I Trade for a Living__, in which he spends a good deal of time discussing how he has traded using pure price action. As far as I know, it involves looking for norms that repeat consistently over time, such as breakout patterns. Larrry Williams gets into...

Interesting point of view, Brownsfan. I actually have had comparatively good luck with CL and ZS, and I agree with both you and Retire45 that ES is a tough market to trade. Yes, YM can be boring, but I think trading is supposed to be basically boring. In any case, making money is never really...

Hi folks, As traders who use technical analysis for day-trading, which futures markets do you like the best? Putting aside considerations of fundamental factors, that is, from a purely technical standpoint, which markets do you think typically demonstrate the smoothest, most orderly...

Hi folks, What are the relative merits and disadvantages of using charts based on a given range (such as, for example, 5 points on the Dow Futures), ticks (say 250 ticks per bar), or volume (e.g. 10,000 e-mini S&Ps)? I'm intrigued by these alternatives to the usual time-based charts and was...