Improving Trading Skills

Quote from Albert Cibiades:

"I don't do predictions, my focus is on holdng and reversing stuff."

Excuse me, but every position taken constitutes a prediction. Otherwise you wouldn't take it.
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Here is how you may consider rephrasing what you said:

Excuse me, For me everypostion I take is an ENTRY and because of the trading tools I restrict myself to,I am always taking a 1 in three chance that I am going to beat the odds and be a winner. Otherwise, I personnally wouldn't take it.

Now my view that you do not comprehend.

I hold a position as long as it is making money and I have a view that the operating point of the market is determined by alternative potential operating points being closed off from considration by the progression of events during my hold. Finally at the end of this closing off of alternatives only one alternative remains. It becomes more slaient than the current operating points and the MIGRATION occurs (there is NO jumping around).

Since the odds are nominally I in three, I never never go to prediction since it is absurd to do when money is involved and when rational thinking is demanded for getting the job done.

since I am able to operate based upon developing knowledge, skills and using experience to reinforce both of these, I am operating at a place where I have an array of skiillls and knowledge that enables me to continue to monitor, analyze, make decisions, and act in a timely manner.

what that statement means is that I reverse for two reasons: to lock in profits when an operating point expires and secondly to embark upon the new operating point's potential to continually deliver profits to me as usual.

You think entry and exit based upon prediction in the space.

Were you to consider the P, V relation instead. You would not use prediction as an alternative to the relationship that describes of market operations.

Trading successfully and effectively and efficiently is done as in every other endeavor. No one runs businesses on predictions. All of science and the arts is based upon rational intellectual processes. Trading is not a game nor does game theory apply to it. People are rational beings and their collective behavior is what creates the P, V relation. The entities traded have identities and characteristics that define their utility and relative worth as measured by standard objectiver measures.

I do not look, as you do for trite anomolies and quirks. I mainline right down the highway using a solid fundamental rational approach that is in total synchronicity with the precepts of the market and human beings.

There is no need to deal with risk in any other manner than the degree of uncertainty ordinarily in existance as a function of signal to noise ratios and robustness of the given market operating point.

You can look at the history of the standards of measures of market understanding and determine quite readily and sucinctly that you viewpoint is, roughly speaking, bullshit.

The above paragraph is a well founded negative assessment of your dumb statement. your views that you have are cast in a concrete that you mixed and poured and cast and let harden so as to be permenant for you. That is how it is going to be fore you for quite a while.

My personal preference is to iteratively refine what I know and do as a continuing porcess that is operating in concert with how any human being is capable of operating.

It is extremely important for any living person to not get stuck in a place that deprives him of his potential. There is very little risk of considering rationally what something is; how it works and how to develop a relationship with it. This applies to humans as well. That is the only reason that I have taken the time to respond to your bullshit.

There is a BIG difference between "betting" on something and knowing what you are doing based upon knowledge, skills and experience. Did you ever wonder why the largest financial operations can't make money? Macro reeks with a bunch of odds makers and curve fitters.

The alternative is seamless continuous trading. Ask Nitro to explain to you how I used software that he ID'ed to modify the unbelievable prints I posted on my trading while mentoring. Its time for another lap on that bullshit too.
 
Grob109, now we are on epistemological grounds. It is truly amazing that you can get inside my head and read my mind at such a remove.

In rebuttal of your cogently argued post, which I very much enjoyed reading, let us consider an example where you make a prediction. It is the session opening. You have previously drawn multiple longer term (than intraday) trend lines suggesting S and R. You have seen synchronization occur. You see ES lead $INDU. You see price surge with supporting volume. Perhaps I am wrong on the details, but you see a series of events build which lead you to believe that a rocket has begun and you enter. In essence, for your first trade of the day, you have predicted that something will happen. And you believe that your predictions have a reasonable profit expectation, or you would not have developed and be using that set of rules.

I am willing to concede that by my definition of prediction not all of your trading actions are predictive. But to give other predictive examples, FTT's and BO's are, as are DOM-based actions.

In your description of the narrowing of possibilities, I see a prediction which you view as a near certainty.

And kindly do not presume that my own trading decisions have odds as poor as 1 in 3. I build up near certainty based on a set of market dynamics based rules. Some of those rules involve volume, but not in the simplistic binary way formulated by your P/V rules.

As to reversing, there are times during the day when one should best simply stand aside, where for a matter of hours it may not be clear what the new direction will be. If you are in a position at such times, the risk continues to grow that you have taken a position with the masses, and that you will be thwarted.

As to rationality, my belief based on intraday statistical analyses is that limit order traders trade rationally, whereas market order traders do not. Therefore the ability to think both ways has value in market order trading like we both do. The ability to be cooly irrational is in my opinion essential. I have formed the belief in intraday trading based on the correlation between price behavior and my own gut reactions that the irrationality of the crowd has been codified and forms part of the basis of automated trading. In particular, I believe that extreme paranoia also has its uses for private traders.

Finally, if I recall correctly, you have not been in business per se for nearly 50 years. Modern business, far from being ultra-logical, is statistically based. Its actions are predictive, based on statistical control methods.

So we are polar opposites. And yes, there were five usages of the word "not" in this post. But at least the spelling is correct. Always a pleasure, Al.
 
Some interesting posts. Jack I am curious how you traded the open yesterday(7/21). Bar 4 was an inside bar in the middle of a high volatility stall with a fbo on bar 7 and finally a bo on bar 10. If you entered before bar 10 would you explain where and why.
 
Quote from Albert Cibiades:

"I don't do predictions, my focus is on holdng and reversing stuff."

Excuse me, but every position taken constitutes a prediction. Otherwise you wouldn't take it.
More...

i dont think it does.

prediction suggests prior insight. knowledge of the future. are we prophets or traders?

personally, i dont know what the next tick will be, let alone able to make a prediction on what price will be tomorrow or 2 mins.

what i do have is an idea that probability of my thing hapening is in my favor. it may happen, it may not. i dont care, because i know in the long term, it will go my way more often than not.
 
Quote from Albert Cibiades:

BSAM, perhaps it my own bizarre trading style, but more than simply predicting, I am absolutely certain that every trade I put on will be a winner. I don't think probabilities, statistics, expectation, any of that. Of course I am often shockingly wrong, but I just don't enter unless I am convinced of the ineluctability, the inevitability, of the move I foresee. However, I fail to see that kind of certainty in what I understand of Grob109's intraday trading principles. They seem to me to be very fuzzy and hard to pin down. Perhaps one of his associates will clarify, as the man himself seems incapable of it. Regards, Al.
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albert.

this imo could be an accident waiting to happen.

if you are so sure, and set your self up for such certainties, where none exist, you will end up disapointed.

i believe this can be very damaging to the individual. it suggests that there is too much ego involved in your trades?


i went through this when i first started, but dont give a hoot anymore.

what do i know?


sorry - folks - hope im not taking this on a tangent.
 
Fred, to quote you: "What i do have is an idea that probability of my thing hapening is in my favor. it may happen, it may not. i dont care, because i know in the long term, it will go my way more often than not."

IMO a probabilistic decision is a prediction. You are predicting that the positive expectation will persist. Regards, Al.
 
Again, Fred: "...certainties, where none exist..." Let us speak of certainties, and their flavors. Grob109 promotes bracketed breakouts of ES intraday. It is a certainty (barring the end of the world, or at least of New York) that price eventually will break out of a two tick infinitesimal volume consolidation. The uncertainty is in which direction first, and then which direction ultimately. Grob109 asserts that his method nails it with no losses, regardless of ultimate direction. Under a very strict set of circumstances, I have a method which does the same thing. My confidence in its profitability is around 90%, which to me is certainty. Any probability approaching the odds that I will wake up alive tomorrow is good enough to trade on.

Another certainty is that price cannot rise or fall precipitously forever, and that it will correct. One of Grob109's tools for assessing that reversal is his FTT. The late dbphoenix had a volume based method for determining the same thing, which IMO offers a higher probability of being correct than Grob109's method, verging on certainty.

I could go on, especially with regard to external influences (news, oil), but you get my drift. Regards, Al.
 
Quote from FredBloggs:

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i went through this when i first started, but dont give a hoot anymore.

what do i know?


...
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as long as you are prepared to exit even on a loss, and to limit that loss, then there is no problem. Problems always occur if there is no plan for managing a position ... or if the trader is unable to deal with a loss.

At the Merc it used to be the case that the very first thing a new member was taught was to go out on the floor, randomly take a trade and then take a loss - the lesson being that its no big deal and part of the job.
 
Quote from FredBloggs:

i guess were talking semantics here!!
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Thats an understatement if I ever heard one. This debate has been going on for years. Only the con side keeps changing.:)
 
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