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Arthur Deco Mentors ET Noobs
- Thread starter Arthur Deco
- Start date
Quote from cap'ncod:
My I be so bold. Am I correct in saying your system is volume based, either partly or predominantly? If not, would you mind, without spilling one's beans, telling what it is looking for. If it is looking at 'behaviour' in relation to a certain event at a certain time and a prediction of wave size etc, then would I be correct in saying it has to be tailored to a specific market and could not work universally? You seek the Kahuna (now I know why I thought about Hemingway). The big move that you say cannot be predicted with price behaviour. So is it oscillation. Is time a factor. Much obliged, Art.
Are you sure you aren't just tempting me to make a bigger ass of myself than I already have? Excuse my paranoia, but there are at least two numerological cults on ET that I have had run-ins with because they think volume is significant. I am painfully aware that my own massive perceptual handicaps may be preventing me from perceiving the truth. And on occasion I get sweaty thinking I am missing something. So I go test the shit out of every conceivable connection between price and volume. Let me make something clear. If I believe something and it fails testing, I don't believe it any more. If I don't believe something and it passes testing, I start believing it. My bottom line is:
VOLUME HAS ABSOFUCKINGLUTELY NO RELIABLE PREDICTIVE POWER FOR PRICE.
Volume is good for:
fixin' ta git reddy ta mebba start thinkin' about preparin' ta start wondrin' if ya might aughta consider watchin' for tha chance ta punch out after a volume blowout (doing so immediately tests poorly)
takin' a chance on hittin' tha head when volume drops ta a certain level when price action is quiet (I can only forward test this, which I call the "piss" test)
gittin' reddy ta scale in when volume drops to a sartain level when price action is hot (testing shows that this is at least as reliable as a coin toss, if not less)
Is volume on my charts? Oh, hell, yes! I have beautifully artistic studies overlaid on it (CAN one get overlaid?).
Do I use it in my systems? Regretfully, no. I guess I am not smart enough to.
Do I keep trying to find significunts in volume? Oh, hell yes! I have two systems running on my screen now. They will probably meet the fate of all the other volume systems I thought held promise.
Re whether or not what I do has broader applicability, I have no clue. It works worse on ES. But I haven't tried it on anything else. I have no motivation to at present, because first I have to figure out how to disguise my use of it so it can't be reverse engineered. That is consuming most of my attention and testing now.
As to the nature of the big kahuna, it comes when it comes. Don't you come when you come? Most of the time I have no real clue as when I am going to come. But at my age I do know myself well enough to know whether or not I will EVENTUALLY come. If not, I find something else to do. I do the same with trading. Check my posting for timing. If I am posting, there won't be a big kahuna. However, the opposite is not true, because I may be otherwise occupied having an orgasm.
Quote from Zr1Trader:
Ok let me interview you, give me your system, i'll write an EBook that anyone can purchase for 49.99 to find the secret to untold wealth. BUT WAIT THERES MORE!!!!!
It might only BE worth 49.99. You never know what a system is worth until you scale it up and see what happens. My suspicion is that success will be short-lived due to reverse-engineering. So before I scale up I am going to make my trades look like random entry with money management, which in truth is close to what they are. Even if that has a significant cost in lost profits.
Thanks for the previous responses Mr Deco.
I don't know -- it seems like there is a lot of trying to apply rules and look for regularities where they don't exist, look for if-then statements with 1 and 0 probabilities when they're more like .47 - .53 probabilities, or regularities where by the time you recognize it the regularity is over. I think there's a quote like, "Something works except for when it doesn't", or "something is true except for when it isn't".
If possible, could you expand some more on your "random entry with money management", the money management part? I can't control or predict the price, it will do as it will; but I could get some new perspectives on money management techniques.
I don't know -- it seems like there is a lot of trying to apply rules and look for regularities where they don't exist, look for if-then statements with 1 and 0 probabilities when they're more like .47 - .53 probabilities, or regularities where by the time you recognize it the regularity is over. I think there's a quote like, "Something works except for when it doesn't", or "something is true except for when it isn't".
If possible, could you expand some more on your "random entry with money management", the money management part? I can't control or predict the price, it will do as it will; but I could get some new perspectives on money management techniques.
Quote from Arthur Deco:
It might only BE worth 49.99. You never know what a system is worth until you scale it up and see what happens. My suspicion is that success will be short-lived due to reverse-engineering. So before I scale up I am going to make my trades look like random entry with money management, which in truth is close to what they are. Even if that has a significant cost in lost profits.
I can feel your pain bro
Quote from zedDoubleNaught:
Thanks for the previous responses Mr Deco.
I don't know -- it seems like there is a lot of trying to apply rules and look for regularities where they don't exist, look for if-then statements with 1 and 0 probabilities when they're more like .47 - .53 probabilities, or regularities where by the time you recognize it the regularity is over. I think there's a quote like, "Something works except for when it doesn't", or "something is true except for when it isn't".
If possible, could you expand some more on your "random entry with money management", the money management part? I can't control or predict the price, it will do as it will; but I could get some new perspectives on money management techniques.
I thank you most profoundly for asking the kinds of questions I hoped to elicit, even though you clearly aren't a noob.
But that won't keep me from being snippy (I'm taking it out on you because in the Third World country I live in we are having rolling power outrages).
You are certainly right about the market not being binary, but trading is. I can't decide to be 47 percent long. So in trade-by-trade testing the decision has to be yea/nay. After the stats are in, you can decide how DEEP to get in a given trade based on seconday conditions that may be too hard to include on the testing.
I wrote "random entry with money management" because that's an old catch-phrase. Lazy me. More properly it goes as follows:
you get a wild-assed idea
you reduce to the simplest possible set of rules (the crude algorithm), the fewer the better
you code that algorithm, taking care to add other practical conditions you didn't think about in the rules
you optimize the stop loss with no profit target
you optimize the profit target with the best stop
you reoptimize the stop loss for the best profit target
you reoptimize the profit stop for the new stop loss
you ignore it for a few months
you repeat the above
if the stops are relatively stable, you trade it
repeat the optimization periodically.
The "money management" part is simple. You trade EXACTLY the way the fucking systems tells you to, whether you think it is right or not.