I am pleased to note that clmarathon has taken some good advice and has chosen not to trade today. I would have been disappointed to read that he had been induced to go short today and stopped out numerous times for a net loss.
Quote from NoDoji:Yeah, I love the after the fact analysis where you can see the pivot highs/lows and then retrofit the perfect entries/exits in the post-market analysis.
"How about, setting a range of 15 points from the high or low as the "optimum" range for this market, and play with continuous reversals."
Which high/low do you use when trading this strategy at the hard right edge (instead of when painting those perfect buy/sell signals on the static chart end of session)?
Hi NoD,
In each case if you go to your 1 minute chart I have labelled the minute of each entry. You will see that the high / low which is being referenced occurred within a few minutes of the entry, and always 15c away.
You will have observed yourself that it is possible to enter a certain distance from the highs or lows of a leg in the market. The 15 cents range on its own does not give you the trigger. If you have an indication that the up leg is ending and the down leg is taking over, then note the highest price achieved during that series of price schedules. A move X cents lower than this high is your trigger to sell short. The faster your timeframe or more accurate your triggers the closer this distance can be from the extreme of the move. In nearly all cases however some confirmation is required. The more "confirmation" the better up to a certain point when no extra information is added and one is then entering the move "late". So there is a number. In this example I'm using 15 cents.
So your system indicates a sell trade. This could be because the market is in a time window for a turn. If the market retraces X cents from the high, you sell. This gets you in within X points of the start of the move. The market pulling back 15 cents at the apex gives you an extra piece of information which you can use to make your strike rate higher. If one drills down to a micro timeframe and examines what happens with the orders at the turning points of a market this makes sense.
So you need to be expecting the turn. The 15 cents is the rule you use to set your entry - the amount of confirmation you need at the start of the opposite move. Stop can go on the other side of this (or if you prefer, reversing long with the trend after taking a counter trend short).
If you look at the 1 minute and the timestamps I gave, you will see that each entry is 15 ticks away from a high or low which occurred in the prior 5 minute period. Today this number worked well for entering the moves with very little retracement against the initial entry. There was one move which did not follow through very far and a reversal signal was indicated shortly after.
Quote from NoDoji:
Although I use a different strategy, I do agree that a profit similar to this on days with a decent range is quite attainable.
Exactly, precisely. Scooping out 10-20% of what was on offer today is very good indeed. Nobody is going to sneeze at making 100-150 ticks per contract per day, and kudos to anyone who is achieving this day in day out. The possibility for improvement always exists of course.
Quote from NoDoji:The reason why she is able to do this in real time at the hard right edge, not after the fact looking at the end of day chart is because while she was an aspiring trader she finally decided to get real about what was actually happening in the market, and she made a detailed plan to extract net gains from the daily session.
I was using "she" for third person singular of indefinite gender - rather than writing "he or she", s/he or resorting to "they" which is the plural form and therefore grammatically incorrect. It did not refer to you specifically and was not intended as a pop at you.
I do believe you have put together a plan to do well enough for yourself in the CL market. The nature of my objection to some of your comments to newbies is that what works for you will not work for them unless they learn for themselves, and the way you communicate certain concepts to them is potentially confusing to them. They need to do the work themselves, and ought not to be trading live when they don't yet have a methodology and confidence in place. I stand by my comments that encouraging someone who is getting haphazard results to trade in a live account more frequently is injurious to their financial health.
Hopefully you can see that my issues with you aren't personal or malice based, but simply distaste for what I believe to be dangerous / incorrect advice. This is not a silly little game that anyone can or should play just because they happen to have an account. Money is very much tied up with the ability to survive (and will be more so in the future as various socialist 'aid' programs collapse as they well should). I don't like to see somebody lose their ass because they are encouraged to do what they should not be doing by people they perceive as more knowledgeable than themselves.
My intent is not to be negative but to be positive by suggesting to newbies that they thoroughly evaluate everything and come to their own conclusions. If their trading is so shocking and haphazard as to put them at risk of losing money I suggest in the strongest possible terms that they do not trade. This isn't to put them off, but to save them financial and emotional damage which may ultimately prevent them from succeeding. It is very cruel to tell someone who is clearly guessing at entries that they have a valid technical edge and should continue to trade it.
Quote from NoDoji:I challenge any CL trader here (especially Blotto) to post real time trade entries (with stops) based on Blotto's quoted strategy and choose turning points with the kind of precision alluded to in his after the fact analysis
ET is not suitable for this due to the ability to fudge by editing posts in the several minutes permitted to do so. By the time the entry is called, 'traders' have the position in the money and the stop at 'break even' so they never lose. Also, to the second timestamping is required especially for a volatile market.
How many times have I been tempted to do this for the right reasons to show what is possible and permanently shut up the detractors who post drivel or try to make everything personal. The sad truth is aside from showing that it can be done, making live calls has nothing to do with helping the newbie to find a path for themselves, or to think logically about the market. It does provide a powerful demonstration of who can do what, and by extension who ought to be listened to. Then again, so does the content of the argument for those sufficiently aware. I have done "live" with some people on more appropriate and accurately timestamped channels in the past. It is possible to correctly anticipate high probability outcomes with a very high degree of accuracy - however aside from giving belief that it can be done what I can do has nothing to do with whether somebody else has the self belief or the ability to run their own "four minute mile".
A side question if you would like to answer it. You've banged your own head against it for long enough and seem to have got somewhere - have you not noticed yourself that very few are cut out for this, cannot or will not learn, insist on arguing or discussing irrelevant considerations instead of being focused on what they should be doing? 99% don't have what it takes to execute even if they were taught a profitable strategy.
Two big bug bears for me - insufficient respect for the markets and the value of money to think that one can just wade in without thorough preparation. This includes anyone who encourages same, or lacks the honesty and candour to tell a newbie, when solicited for advice, that they ought not to be trading.
Second bug bear - textbook terms and cliches with no application of thought - trend, noise and indecision being good examples. There is no such thing as noise. And "indecision" appears to be the catch all term for when a trader does not know what the market is doing or the market appears to be in a range.
As for trend - aside from the transaction costs I would not be surprised to learn that the biggest single cause of the public losing money in the markets is their tendency to rely on the untested and unproven assumption that the market will continue in the direction it travelled in the previous N minutes/hours/days/weeks/months.
The market may appear to be moving up because there is a trend. In reality, there appears to be a trend because the market has moved up. Whether it has moved up is insufficient information in itself to know if it is likely to continue moving up. To borrow an analogy from elsewhere: when a ship moves through the water it leaves behind it a wake. The wake is caused by the ship moving forward. However it may appear to the uninformed observer that the wake is pushing the ship.
Another great cliche is the myth that a losing trader needs better discipline in executing a fundamentally flawed system. Actually, I could go on all day as the flawed assumptions which pervade mainstream thought, trading literature, and trading forums are numerous. Probably best that I don't.
Continued success to you all.
