The Perpetuated Fraud of Candle Charting

You are so cruel to make an old man feel his decrepit age! Venerable Eli was at least as old as I am now when I first met him. I'll never forget the little mnemonic he taught me way back when: Black Boys Rape Our Young Girls, But Violet Gives Willingly, Get Some Now. A mnemonic doubtless needed no longer. As to your dilemma, my only counter observation is that so many codes work on one minute that you will see trades based on support or resistance trip exactly on the change of the minute. Inexplicably, the spread often widens for that one second. I have looked at other likely time frames and found nothing there. So I agree. Which is why I stay glued to my compressed one second chart, lost in an otherwise referenceless ocean of swells.
 
Perhaps that old man shouldn't make such definitive statements when it's only his own limitations that are the real issue at hand :)

But then again, that old man has something that works for him so we are happy for him. We just hope that old man would stop obsessing over stuff that he "doesn't use".

Quote from Fleming Snopes:

You are so cruel to make an old man feel his decrepit age!
 
Quote from Fleming Snopes:

I'll never forget the little mnemonic he taught me way back when: Black Boys Rape Our Young Girls, But Violet Gives Willingly, Get Some Now.

Alas, I attended school in the earlier part of this decade, so I learned it as Bad Boys Race Our Young Girls Behind Victory Garden Walls, with a smirk from the professor. The "get some now" portion is a clever addition, however, I must confess ignorance as to the meaning of the "now" portion.

It is actually still useful - certainly quicker than trying to fumble for the little cards that come included in the textbooks.
 
Quote from Eli the ice man:

Ah, Fleming, you have hit upon the central problem of my intraday trading investigations so far.

From the beginning, the question of phase shift has always nagged me. What happens to all your finely tuned analysis, your MAs or Keltners or whatever other mountains of technical crap you can pile on a chart if your nice, pretty little 15 minute bar has its open and close times shifted by 7.5 minutes? Or 5 minutes? Or 1 minute, 42 seconds? And on and on. What makes the price at the beginning and end of an arbitrary time period important enough to make it half the data on any given chart?

The same problem plagues constant volume and tick charts. Why the hell do I care where the price was at the beginning and end of some arbitrary 233-tick period?

For now, I have settled on range charts - hi/lo only, no wicks or bodies or dojis and hammers cluttering up my screen. I've looked at some of the P&F, renko, 3lb, and what not type charts as well...but this type of charting is exotic and not available on the cheap on an intraday basis (which is my primary concern right now, as I am only papertrading).

Unless I'm mistaken, and all traders worldwide take a synchronised breather every 15mins/5mins/1min, I totally agree on intraday phase shift - the problem is easy to illustrate by constructing a certain series of price ticks, generate the candles, then, shift the phase and get a new series of candles that look very different. In view of this ambuiguity, it's a total mystery to me how you are supposed to discern patterns from intraday candles.

But for anyone who can use them successfully, well, I take off my hat to you.
 
Quote from Yossarian:

...But for anyone who can use them successfully, well, I take off my hat to you.
I prefer to take my hat off to people in the summer months. It's more of a win-win that way.
 
There is no denying that your charting software must be robust and match the mkt exactly (meaning close and open of bars, whatever frame you look at). If you use charts through your broker (free charts) then that could be a major issue as I've never seen accurate free charting software. I mean accurate on ALL bars/candles.

We are all screwed if we trade off charts and our data isn't pristine.
 
So true. That is why I rag on SCT traders. Due to errors in the raw data stream in fast markets, anywhere from 5 to 15% of volume is underreported by the charting software. If either the bid or the ask is null, and last is at neither, the software drops it from T&S and from counting in volume. So much for fine distinctions about volume trend.
 
I always refresh my data during a fast bar and it always updates if the data wasn't pulled through. I have multiple data sources for volume and they always line up (meaning they are consistent across sources). In the rare cases they don't, I can usually tell enough to have confidence to place a trade (if indeed I get a setup during this time).

I cannot speak for others who use volume, to the accuracy of their data, but I can tell you with confidence that I don't usually ever have any issues with under-reporting volume. And, if it is done without my knowledge, then it's very consistent across sources because it hasn't seemed to be an issue in terms of following the sequences of my trading and the outcomes of my trades.

Quote from Fleming Snopes:

So true. That is why I rag on SCT traders. Due to errors in the raw data stream in fast markets, anywhere from 5 to 15% of volume is underreported by the charting software. If either the bid or the ask is null, and last is at neither, the software drops it from T&S and from counting in volume. So much for fine distinctions about volume trend.
 
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