Well now I agree and I respectfully disagree. Rules can be nothing more than guidelines to embrace probability. When they become the object and focus then we have erred. The goal is to make money not trade rules. For example here is a rule. "Follow the trend." But that needs to be defined. Which trend? JSS wants to follow the long term trend. That is fine and dandy. But that won't work for intraday trading. What happened two years ago has little if any impact on todays session. So, for todays session i should look for another trend. The trend from Friday's high (the prev) session was down and remained down all night. That has much more influence on todays session that some forgotton trend in 2013. As concerns PA. Well B.O. are the bulls exerting their influence to force price up. That happened right after the open RTH. but the overnight trend was down. So, a trader should wait and see if there is follow thru on the B.O. Simply because most B.O. fail. If we would have kept up HH and HL on swing legs on this mornings B.O. then yes probabilty favors long. But instead the B.O. collapsed. If i were long at this apparent collapsing my rules would promptly go into the garbage bin and i am getting immediately getting out and grabbing whatever profits i can get. There are rules for markets in general and then there are PA rules. But what REALLY rules is not my rules but the market is what RULES. I am not being very smart to argue with the market regardless of what my rules tell me. The market cares little about me or my finally crafted, tweaked, carefully designed, rules. The day to day PA is a fight between the bull and bear institutions. The chart will show you what they are doing and who is winning. See, at this moment on 10:05 bar we are rallying back to probally the ma after a wedge bottom (three pushes down). If i were long on this rally i would ride it until near the ma or for any little profit and then look for shorting. We do have a higher low but the PA TO LEFT says extreme weakness yet. So i would not ride any rally far. But if it turns into a good rally after it comes back to test the extreme then i may look at going long for a bigger haul. Otherwise, i am looking for shorting opportunities until PA shows me otherwise.
I DISAGREE with much of what you write, I have found I am 100% rule based, you program long enough, you think in terms of coding and rules. When you automated, there is no room for fudging unless you code for parameters to be accepted. PA never changes cause people never change, programming don't change cause they have to be based on time of when markets changed based on something occurring which is people moods. I have spend decades at finding alternating labels, market is strong and people are greedy, market looks toppy, people have fear, sell the rally in downtrend-dumb people are getting in early, market dropping on lite volume, people are deer in headlites as at some point they will get out so late I will be buying. I stopped thinking in terms of Bull/Bear or uptrend/downtrend, I think in terms of waves of a swing for day trading, and use bars of a wave for scalping-smaller you trade, there is noise you are collecting in ticks. I use to project what the market "should" do, but waste of brain energy-I know what it has done and wait for a rule based signal, I plain allowed the market to win and give up thinking when I manually trade, am 100% rule based trader, have the rules down like breathing, simple don't think-just do.
You might be far better trader than I, most people are better than me as many ways I never had ability to do till later in life as I fought so hard in beginning that my way was way to trade, but gladly I gave up those ways and accepted who I am and what I can do, only then I been able to do what many can't which is accept, so much much easier.
I see Buy1Sell1 as very good trader, he stays the course, doesn't allow anyone to alter how he trades, he is allowing anyone to look over his shoulder and stay the course.
