I'm not anywhere near having the capability to automate but I am working on building harder rules to guide my manual trading that would eventually be the rules for an auto system. I've been exploring many options and keep coming back to just two: one NL derived, and one based on instrument price vs my price levels. Have you have found value in trade inputs outside of ACD? I'm just about to the point of discarding everything else, at least in the TA family. One that I would like to test in the future is a fundamental input. I'm helping a family member create an excel sheet that pulls fundamental data via API to help him perform his value investing calculations in a more efficient manner. Once I'm done I'm going to try that as an input, something simple like the current growth rate being priced in to a security by the market according to standard value formulas. I know this may be asking a bit much so feel free to ignore the question.
This is complicated. Since I trade energy, yes, I do look at a lot of things outside ACD. ACD forms the basis of my sentiment forecasting. But with energy, you HAVE to look at fundamentals. I don't want to go into what I use, just that I use them. For things like stocks, fundamentals are really only useful for longer term holding periods. For stuff like FX, you need to look at rates and more specifically, yield curves.
To make this easy, I would focus on classification. What environment does a particular product thrive in. This is really what the essence of what O'Neil did. He tried to figure out what conditions need to be met to find an explosive stock. This approach can be used for Gold, FX, Bonds, Grains, etc.
