Sorry not to have responded sooner. I was doing something quite out of character for an ET member: trading. Jack, I am nearly speechless at the fact that you have an engineering education but fail to apply appropriately quantitative tools to the avocation of trading. It is as if you were a practicing engineer but never measured or simulated or tested anything. Limiting the fineness of your distinctions to price up, price down, volume up and volume down amounts to using the coarsest imaginable fuzzy logic. Sure, not too warm, not too cool, not too moist, not too dry works great for climate control, but this is Bitch Market we're triffling with. You must make discrete entry and exit decisions and specific prices and times. What is at play in those decisions, whether you realize or like it or not is at its least complex, binary decision theory, and at its most hellishly complex, multivariate decision theory. Your mentees have such a documented hard time learning from you precisely because you don't teach them this explicitly. Suppose all I have is a digital display of price with no time tags, just a price dial readout. When I make an entry or exit decision, perforce I am using some internalized binary decision mechanism, because I have only one decision factor: is price in some sense low enough or high enough to confidently take a directional position. If I add time, I added a second dimension, is it a good time to trade, making my trading bivariate. If I think in terms of time rate of change of price, or something similar, I became trivariate. Add volume to the mix, and consider partial derivatives of the full data set, and I have a full-blown multivariate decision to make. This ain't cooking, where not too sweet or not too salty is OK. That is why every single line of every single one of my codes drives to a binary decision. Volume is or is not reliably tradeable. The velocity of price is or is not sufficient. Price is or is not within a tick of support or resistance. Volume is or is not in a blowoff condition. Price is or is not in a blowoff condition. Now I am not smart enough to devise a multivariate decision system using those and other quantifications and individual binary decisions, but fortunately the market usually moves sufficiently slowly that an ideal decision making system can be approximated by a sequence of binary decisions. "Volume is tradeable." "Price velocity just went suprathreshold." "Volume holds tradeable." "Oh fuck, volume just went blowoff!" And don't fantasize for an instant that you aren't quantifying. You are just doing so below the level of awareness. The simple act of drawing a price or volume trendline is a quantification. You just don't know the explicit quantitative consequences of the subconscious quantifications you make. Fuck it. I am done with this foolishness. It is like arguing with a rock.

