Two bars do leave room for some amibiguities. Adding a bar most always quashes these.
I advocate for using bars ASAP to make projections into the future. Abitrarily, the right third of a screen is a sufficient future to have available for the projection.
Leaf your most recent copy of Futures and find that no ad, no illustration and no words deal with any future space that I have above described. Do the same with Forbes, Business Week and any newsletter you subscribe to.
In this thread there is a universal comfirmation as well by ommision and by words that state dealing with this issue can only be done after the fact.
This is a perfection of being in the minority by any standards of probability.
The space to the right of the active bar is the future which moves, successively to the present (NOW) and then to the past where statisticians live and operate.
As a casual comment, I suggest that it is possible to examine the future on seven time frames. The realations of the time frames can be determined either exponentially or linearly. The "good enough" appraoch is to just go with a common multiple of separation (linearly). Use a range of values like 3, 4, and/or 5 for convenience.
You now have a space to the right of the present that has seven pairs of lines one pair for each fof the seven fractals. depending upon which fractal you are viewing you see a more or less messy scene.
For me one thing is for sure, price will fill the interior of this messy scene.
From this we can confirm what Columbus and Magellan's crew discerned: "You can't fall off the edge".
I use this construct, also, to put to rest the concept of applying probabilities to making money. Choose a fractal where you can see ticks and draw horizontal lines through all ticks in the zone of the three bar constructed boundary lines. Tabulate a frequency histogram of price repeatedly hitting this range of ticks. You have the "reversion to the mean" histogram after a while. You can make these histograms according to a period of existance as well. So you can see that buying and selling on the most popular prices doesn't make much money and you see that there is a higher and higher probability of making money the less money you make per trade. We must escape this profound dilemma at all costs.
So you raise the two key questions for making money in one straight forward post.
1. How do you stay on the right side of the market?
and
2. How do you chose the right timeframe for keeping up with the market while trading?
Answers:
1. I recommend annotaing with geometry and knowing at all times how the price cycle is unfolding according to the P, V relationship (Boolean algebra).
2. I made an excel spread sheet of the compound interest formula where the seven fractals are depicted. For given trading entities, I listed the market potential of each fractal and the facets of effectiveness and efficiency for a trader. I have posted the excel spread sheet partially completed for ES. I called the sheet "the yellow brick road".
Results for people following my recommendations.
For stock trading:
In ET as a starting effort, spytrader ran for a year and did 100% oncapital. In contrast, if it is programmed in C language and done mechanically it produces for the initial six months an average yield of 11.1% every 6.6 days; the first refinement increased the net by 20%.
For intraday on ES the leverage results in about 50 times the stock results.
The chart to use for stocks if you are not monitoring is the EOD chart. The chart to use if you are monitoring is the 15 or 30 minute chart.
For intraday trading use the five minute chart on ES and observe on YM the front running on the 2 minute chart. To be on the right side of the market through the day about 20 to 40 actions are required.
The general envelope of concerns for making money evolves around continuity of thought. As a sensory based consideration it is like being able to appreciate music, primarily. There is one exception. Music is "given" to you to appreciate. It comes to you.
For making money, you must step into the picture as a participating musician would. And it is necessary to create a market monitoring device to allow the senses to be able to monitor. Further annotating the monitoring device in the "future" part of the display is a requirement.
The seven interelated fractals may be deemed as a set of instruments that are capable of contributing to the harmony of the composition. The existing and impending theme for each is derived from the near term and projected into the future periodically. All parts are seeable and the monitoring focus is on maximizing money velocity with the given potential that is unfolding.
You choose the fractals (see above) to extract with greatest effectiveness and efficiency.
So you see geometric annotations that the price comes to as the future moves to the present. These are limits where, if you do histograms of given periodicities, you see that where you reverse to stay on the right side of the market is, if fact, the lowest probability points on the histograms. You see that you are NOT trading where the most frequent trades are done and you ARE trading where the smallest minority(who control the markets) trade.
By annotating nd projecting boundaries, you are putting a plan of action on your screen and you front run the market by holding as the maximum rate of transactions drives more and more profits into your account. Being on the right side of the market is a "holding" strategy. Others you see by the distribution and corrsponding probabilities of doing trades are playing the entry and exit game and have W/L and R/R ratios to match and suite. you are fostering an annotation system that allows you to see the P, V relationship go on and on, and give you the turning points in the relationship well in advance of their occurance.
As in music when a theme comes to an end, another movement commences. The composer sets up the listener for these occurrances. Because of comments in this thread related to music, I suggested Savion join in. Actually for any composition to be better approeciated savion should be on the floor to prjoect an essence in another language to pring out the values in the piece.
Here in making money we can do that very thing and in advance of price. By being in the minority and having the future always in view and watching it move to the present (as a scoping and bounding in contrast to periodic updates on reversion to the mean (the principle of probabilities as used here in W/L stuff), we get to deal with optimising money velocity through effectiveness and efficiency.
The fractals form shells of future price movement; concurrent multiple trends are in effect. This is the scene that determines the frequency of extraction of profits and whether concurrent independant accounts are at play or are occasionally converged when concurrent turning points come from the future to NOW (the proverbial home runs are hit at these times (usually unknowingly)).
It is not easy to leave the herd mentality. The herd is always observable and you can see its actions build and mount right in the middle of things. At some point it does become more clear how all the quant efforts glean anomolies from the macro data pools. Look at the Prop shops mantras in the data flow. Low money velocity is inherent in these monthly results postings.
Thanks for gleening the most pertinent stuff from what you read.
As you can see, you are the key to making money. You are building your mind so it contains the truths with which to compare for making the right decisions at the right times.
Always check yourself to see if you are doing the dopamine thing rather that the adrenaline or cortisol thing.
