The ACD Method

Emini up 40 points, and could care less that crude is struggling to stay green....anyone remember how different things were back in Jan/Feb?
 
Emini up 40 points, and could care less that crude is struggling to stay green....anyone remember how different things were back in Jan/Feb?

I think the key takeaway is not that the ES is up 40 but rather we are still going no where, we are still in the same old range.
 
fut_chart.ashx
 
ACD works great intraday, by definition it has to since all our number lines are being derived from intra-day levels. The problem with intra-day trading in general is risk. While most traders incorrectly believe that swing trading involves more risk since they are holding overnight what they are not accounting for is the accumulation of small losses over time of intra-day trading. The so called, death by a thousand cuts. One of the issues all traders have to deal with is the noise factor. The variance around the model. There is no way to get rid of the noise, you have to live with. In a perfect world, you model the "expected noise" so you position size correctly so you can live through it but intra-day traders are time constrained if they have to get out at market close. This means one might have to live with a market where the noise dominates the signal. The signal might be valid, but if you don't have enough time to sit out the noise, the noise wins.

This is one of the reasons why Fisher talks about time stops and not going back to the well over and over again. Traders who stop out, re-enter then stop out again, then re-enter and get stopped out again are destined for ruin. There is no mathematical way to overcome that. Why? Because of the time constraint. As time goes by through the day, your opportunity to generate losses increases and your ability to make them back decreases proportionally.

So in order to trade intra-day you better bring some math skills to the table because position sizing is absolutely critical and you better have some statistics skills in your tool box. If one has perfect information (which they won't) they could size perfectly and never lose money. Since we don't have perfect information, one has to estimate. The better you can estimate this risk to get closer to the perfect information, the higher the odds of success. Sadly to say, most ETers don't have this skill and think daytrading is all about honoring your stops and having good risk to reward ratios which honestly, are totally irrelevant to success. Hence the huge failure rates. If you want to see examples of this, peruse the topstep threads and collect the data.

Mav, ... thanks for your reply.

1. Does the time constraint concept therefore imply that an intraday trader who was able to trade both ETH and RTH would, in theory, be better off trading ETH?

2. Would one way of mitigating the noise factor be the use of larger stops so time stops can be implemented? And is this one of the reasons why you recommend trading the currency markets via Forex, as one has greater flexibility in being able to position size correctly?
 
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Mav, ... thanks for your reply.

1. Does the time constraint concept therefore imply that an intraday trader who was able to trade both ETH and RTH would, in theory, be better off trading ETH?

2. Would one way of mitigating the noise factor be the use of larger stops so time stops can be implemented? And is this one of the reasons why you recommend trading the currency markets via Forex, as one has greater flexibility in being able to position size correctly?

I think you need to be flexible. There is no one answer. I do know that just limiting yourself to intra-day makes you very vulnerable to variance. And there is no real way to hedge that. For a longer term trader, the variance actually benefits you. So I think you need to do both. Larger stops is not the answer nor is tighter stops. Stops have to be properly fitted for the given environment.

Currencies do offer flexibility in position sizing but that does not mean you have an edge in trading them. There are a lot of moving parts here in this equation and too often traders just do things for the wrong reasons like trade ES because they think they "understand stocks" or daytrade because of the fear of some overnight move. If you should be so lucky to ever find an edge somewhere, THAT is what you trade. Then use your analytical tools to optimize your position sizing.
 
You dont need to watch TV to see who is up in the presidential race - just watch the market, its swinging with the vote. I am seeing this for the first time :-). ES has already covered the average weekly range.
 
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