Spydertrader's Jack Hershey Equities Journal

[kgharris]

Quote from makosgu:

Yikes!!! I was hoping that there would be at least some difference in value, but same value in sign (ie. + vs -), since all we are really interested in is whether there are more buyers than sellers in the market. I may need to hold off putting transferring this into excel since I had no intentions for it to be exact. I would think that the desired calculation would have required some subtle complexities. Since we are not concerned with the strength of this indicator, that I will name as A/D, I will simplify and only use direction in order to reduce it to Jack's binary orientation. A final form will most likely yield -1 (indicating dist) or +1 (indicating acc).

On a second note, after googling around, I didn't see anything mentioning that the BOP in WSA is in fact Worden's indicator... Can anybody verify this?

Newbs, look for version v0.15 of the spread sheet to roll out soon.

G33M4K
Keeping it Movin!

I don't see where your concern is - you did not steal anything. You came up with an indicator using nothing proprietary - who cares if it matches Worden's?

And, I am not a lawyer - but, I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.

But, seriously. They cannot infringe on your right to string together some variables. And, you are not even reselling it.

 

[Spydertrader]

Our System signaled three trades this week. Of the three, our rules prevented us from trading two of those signals. The two stocks on which we passed (GMAI and ENWV) continue along different paths. One (GMAI) would have resulted in a slight gain. The other (ENWV) would have resulted in a slightly larger loss. The lesson? Follow the rules. Neither stock hit our target price or our stop loss.

The one trade we did take (HANS) had an exciting ride today. From our buy price of $25.10, HANS rocketed to a high of $26.10 on the day - before falling back to close at $25.00 USD. We will continue to monitor HANS over the next four market days.

One interesting note on HANS, the MACD went into the negative at 2:00 PM when the price of HANS was at $25.57. We noticed a similar occurrence with GMAI. In a previous post, I mentioned the possibility of an alternate exit strategy: MACD Histogram Crossover. Although both GMAI and HANS appear to support the alternate exit strategy, more study is required for several reasons - small sample size and lack of multiple time frame analysis to name two.

Although the week began rather slowly (with few signals to consider), it ended in quite an exciting fashion. I look forward to the coming weeks. Many thanks to all those making contributions to this thread. Your efforts have been greatly appreciated.

Enjoy the weekend!

- Spydertrader

 

[Spydertrader]

Quote from makosgu:

Yikes!!! I was hoping that there would be at least some difference in value.

Don't change a thing. It works perfectly as it is. For Jack's PVAD formula, you simply need to compare the accumulation or distribution to the day prior. As a result, you aren't using BoP as an indicator per se, but you use it to calculate another indicator or 'score' in our case.

Again, nicely done.

- Spydertrader

 

[Spydertrader]

Quote from kgharris:


If this is to much OT, I apologize. Old habits die hard.

Thanks for posting your chart. I appreciate the explanation for the roller coast ride today. Please, feel free to contribute your insight. Your continuing efforts have added much to our discussion.

- Spydertrader

 

[makosgu]

Quote from Spydertrader:

Don't change a thing. It works perfectly as it is. For Jack's PVAD formula, you simply need to compare the accumulation or distribution to the day prior. As a result, you aren't using BoP as an indicator per se, but you use it to calculate another indicator or 'score' in our case.

Again, nicely done.

- Spydertrader

Thanks Spyder. I appreciate your journal. It's the perfect learning experience for me. Keep up the great job!!! Can't wait for next week neither .


G33M4K

 

[makosgu]

Quote from kgharris:

I don't see where your concern is - you did not steal anything. ...

I understand and see your point. It's just a force of habit. I am always conscious of this in my regular day job as I rotate from client engagement to client engagment.

G33M4K

 

[makosgu]

One important correction for those who use the template. As you may or may not have noticed, it was only retrieving data thru 9/28/04 instead of dynamically up to the current day. This release has corrected this coding glitch in addition to including Acc/Dist and the P V A/D Cycle Score .


As Always NJOY!
G33M4K

 

[gallas2]

Quote from Spydertrader:

From our buy price of $25.10, HANS rocketed to a high of $26.10 on the day - before falling back to close at $25.00 USD. [/B]

I would suggest taking partial profits when your initial risk is exceded. Funds your mental account as well as provides income to your trading account.

Quote from Spydertrader: Although the week began rather slowly (with few signals to consider), it ended in quite an exciting fashion. I look forward to the coming weeks. Many thanks to all those making contributions to this thread. Your efforts have been greatly appreciated.

Enjoy the weekend!

- Spydertrader [/B]

This should not be about 'excitement' or boredom. This should be about trading well. Money will follow. You should have the same mental attitude about a rocket as a scratch. We are playing probabilities and nothing more. Our edge means we are playing with loaded dice. That should give you the confidence and the cold calculated view that the trade is nothing more than a coin toss weighted in your favour.

 

[Spydertrader]

Quote from gallas2:

I would suggest taking partial profits when your initial risk is exceeded. Funds your mental account as well as provides income to your trading account.

I agree with your observations here. Trade management is a topic that deserves discussion. Had HANS increased in price to a 5% gain over our entry price, I would have posted such a transaction. Unfortunately, the trend reversed prior to reaching that level. In addition to 'trade management,' I plan to post on the use of 'trailing stops' to protect profits at a later date.

This should not be about 'excitement' or boredom. This should be about trading well. Money will follow. You should have the same mental attitude about a rocket as a scratch. We are playing probabilities and nothing more. Our edge means we are playing with loaded dice. That should give you the confidence and the cold calculated view that the trade is nothing more than a coin toss weighted in your favour.

I certainly agree that eliminating emotional attachment to trading provides many benefits. Even after a year, I often watch in amazement as Jack's Methods find the 'rocket' time after time. I realize cold calculation creates a mental state conducive to trading, but man, is it ever cool to see those rockets take off!

I know. I know. No room for 'Excitement' in trading. I continue to work on remaining in the 'proper' mindset throughout the trade - endeavoring to keep my emotions in check. Fortunately for me (and my trading account), I learned to eliminate two emotions - 'fear' and 'greed' - from my trading long ago while trading the QQQ, SPY and DIA.

Thanks for contributing your insight into the proper psychology to maintain during trading. Your comments are always welcome and helpful.

- Spydertrader

 

[makosgu]

Out of the many aspects related to Jack's QA ROI, I seam to be having the least amount of succes with identifying what is and what isn't a cycle on a chart. Eyeballing is simple but too often I find myself with the wrong visuals. Perhaps I am putting too much emphasis and effort into reducing this part of the process to a complete set of comprehensive equations. But unfortunately, it's the only way that I can sort out details in my own head .

Given the length of discussion around this across numerous threads, my only consensus is that there is no "BEST" or completely thorough way to identify a cycle. I'm assuming that a majority of newbs have had limited success simply because the wrong stocks were being prequalified when applying cycle identification. However, seeing how this is one of the single most subjective factors as to what is or isn't on our hotlist, I don't see how I can overlook any details of this step.

I want to stress that I don't have any problems understanding scoring and how it relates to the cycle. Conceptually, the natural cycle makes incredible sense. Determining which phase of the cycle a stock is in at any given time is not so transparent to me yet.

Converging back to my issue at hand, since the only constraints are for stocks having 5+ historical 20%+ increases on a natural cycle, I assume that these are the only major constituents. However, let me pose a question or two. If a stock exhibits more than a 20% increase over 2 days but winds up being a wash or a loss within a 6-8 day period, is this still considered passing the cycle criteria? As far as I've read, the selection of stock should be excluded to 20% increase over a strict 6-8 day period. Case and point, by relaxing the 6-8 day constriaint to less than 8 days, we find that TASR passes the 5+ 20%+ cycles over the previous 6 months. However, strict 6-8 day use of 20%+ only yields 2 cycles over the same 6 month history with entries triggered circa 7/12/04 and 4/19/04. I've added a plethora of components on top of .15 release to sort thru this murkiness and I hope to soon reduce this to a column or 2 of additional data. Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Regards and thanks to everyone for keeping this thread going... I really appreciate everyone's contribution thus far. They've been outstanding.

G33M4K the Newb