Just two small trades in the morning… I don’t like trading news-driven environments. The bonds were all out of whack, as can be expected, and it was yet another tight-range day.

This video also discusses a funny moment I had talking with a client today. As many of you know, I code custom indicators and strategies for people (usually eotpro.com clients). Well, this one brought an indicator to me from a vendor, wanting to incorporate it into a strategy. But, there was no function provided, and the code was locked. Now, if this were some fabulous unique indicator, we’d be stuck at this point. That’s one reason I was so pleased to be able to offer the Elite Series add-on to the eotpro indicators… it opens their technology up for use in strategies and custom indicators.

Anyway, this looked like a smooth MA, and it just so happened that the first smooth MA I threw on screen matched the vendor’s indicator almost exactly. So funny… I feel sorry for everyone that’s paying for that one.

For reference, when I want a smooth MA, I always reach for the T-3 average, the Hull average, and the Linear Regression Curve. Usually one of those three will give me what I want. This indicator happened to match the Lin Reg Curve.

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I didn’t take any trades today. I woke up about an hour after the markets opened, and looked at the narrow range, and checked in with the eotpro folks, and said “nah.”

I am still exhausted from my trip to NYC. It was a lot of fun, but I only just got back at 1 AM today and I got very little sleep during the trip to start with. So, I have been more-or-less a vegetable today, and of course I’ve been trying to get my cats to forgive me for leaving them. :-)

Anyway, today’s lesson is one of my old favorites… Keep Swinging! Check out the chart for the afternoon. There are three potential trades on it according to my signals.

Let’s say I traded with 2 contracts. I would definitely have taken the first trade. We had a signal and we were at least riding along Alla’s Average, if not quite trending with it. I would have bailed when Bonnie’s Bars turned red, for a 1.5 point loss per contract. It had come within 1 tick of my first profit target, but didn’t get there. So, on two contracts I’d be down a total of 3 points.

Then the second signal comes. I would not take this signal, since price is chopping through Alla’s Average. But, if I did take it for some reason, I’d take one contract off at the first math line, and bail on the rest to bring the total trade to break-even. After I take a partial profit, I don’t like to let the overall trade become a loser. So, whether I took the trade or not, it wouldn’t affect todays bottom line.

Pretty depressing, no? We have to wait for freaking ever between trades, and they have been disappointments. Check out the rank sum histogram showing WIDE stretches of statistical indecision in the trend, too. Well, at least at this point the math lines are still about 2 points apart. So, the risk:reward on many trades still wouldn’t be too bad. Therefore, keep swinging!

The third trade makes the afternoon. It wasn’t my favorite looking action, but it was coming down from a double-top, and did poke through Alla’s Average, tap it, and then fall again. I’d wait for it to make a new low at 1400.25 to get in. So, you get in with 2 contracts, and bail on 1 for 2 points of profit, and the other for 4 points of profit. That’s a total of 6 points, giving you a net profit of 3 points for the afternoon.

$150 isn’t great for three hours of work, but the action was really sucky today, and I’m proud that we came out ahead in a pretty easy and methodical fashion. I’m still brainstorming ways to code “trending against alla’s average” so that my entry will pretty much be entirely mechanical. But, so far, no dice. It’s a complicated concept to turn into an algorithm, in my opinion.

I didn’t even get to turn on my platform today, so I have no idea how the markets went. But, according to Jessica, I don’t merely offer market information. No sirree. I am also a lifestyle advisor. So, here’s a tip from me to you: take a day or two off every now and then. The markets will still be there tomorrow. Get a swedish massage. Or alternately, massage a swede or two.

I’ll be traveling later in the week, and am quite busy trying to tie up loose ends here before my trip. So, posting may be light until next monday. Today, there was just one small trade before I quit for the day. The markets seem extremely sluggish, and dinosaur trader confirms that things don’t look any rosier in the stocks arena. What’s going on, here?

Here are a few screenshots I put together as advertisements for my eotpro elite functions series. They’ll be posted on tradestation forums during the week, but loyal readers here can see them now.

They show off example trades from the setup I have been showing in the live room lately. This was just a simple system I threw together with little or no thought, but over the last week or two in the live room it’s held up pretty well. I think with some tweaking and study it could be tradeable. It’s conservative, in that it doesn’t trade many times per day, but has a very high win rate so far. Not to mention, Bonnie’s Bars tend to keep the losses in the 0 to 2 point range, which is pretty sweet.

What’s interesting to me, is that it doesn’t even use a volume indicator! Funny… and that makes me want to test it on forex data, when I get the chance.

Anyway, as the ads proudly state, this is just one of the many ways you can combine these indicators. I’m biased, of course, since it’s my code… but I’ve been very impressed so far with how well the elite functions and indicators work in concert. Little demonstration ideas like Alla’s MACD and this setup have turned out to be very promising in their own right. I had no idea that would happen so easily, when I put them together.

• Blogging Cross-Talk: Psychology Observations (Bill Rempel, a.k.a. NO DooDahs!)
  A post from the POV of an intermediate- to longer-term mechanical systems trader.
  (tags: trading_systems)

Had to do the video one day late, as I was exhausted on Friday by the time I quit trading. I had stayed up all night the night before fixing up the website. Turns out, I was overdue for a wordpress update since spammers had found a way to put hidden links in all my posts. I would encourage all wordpress bloggers to check their header.php and footer.php every now and then for code you didn’t put there.

Anyway, trading-wise, Friday was a pretty good day. My ultra-conservative signals didn’t fire too many times, but when they did it was a good opportunity. Very nice.

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This is more of a standard blog design. Actually this is the least I’ve changed a template, ever. In fact, I changed so little that I even left the original template author’s link in the footer. That’s going to make upgrading my wordpress installation when new versions come out MUCH easier. There are a few things I’m going to muck with, but this is basically it.

Since my last design accommodated large inline images much better than this one, the layout is a little off on some ancient pages. I’ve gone through and fixed up all the posts from 2008, at least, and will fix others as I run across them.

I have re-enabled comments, but for now at least I’ve got full moderation on. So, don’t expect your comments to appear instantaneously, if you choose to comment. I’ve set wordpress to autoreject the problematic commentors, so I hopefully won’t have to spend any time on them going forward. We’ll see if that works for me, or if I would rather just turn comments off again. I’m just way too busy to spend time on “you suck” or “your hobbies make you stupid” comments.

[edit: I've updated the MtM pictorial history, though I'm probably the only one that likes to stroll down site-design memory lane.]

I come in at about the 46 minute mark. But you may want to watch Bill and Glen’s sections. Glen previews a new scalping method he’s working on, which looks pretty cool. Here is a link to the streaming video:

http://eotpro.acrobat.com/p78032922/.

It was great that there were so many questions. I enjoyed the Q&A part. On the other hand, there were so many questions that I only got to show off a small fraction of the elite package I’ve made available. I was able to go over quite a bit more at my first seminar.

I go over my two trades, and also talk about all the software I use, in response to a user question.

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• A cure for cancer? (uglychart.com)
  Ugly links to all kinds of cool stuff.
  (tags: medicine nanotech)

Pretty bland day… mostly choppy until the end of the day when I had already quit for the day. I made one trade for decent profit.

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I downloaded the latest tradestation build tonight, and played with the simulator and new matrix features. I’m pretty pleased with the new stuff. I know a lot of folks say “too little, too late,” but I have actually been pretty happy with TS.

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• place limit orders at calculated prices without using ’strategy automation’
  (tags: tradestation programming)

I made three trades today, and quit around noon. Not a bad lifestyle. It was 1 loss and 2 wins, as you will see.

I am getting pretty happy with my current setup. It incorporates several old and new ideas together in a way that gives very few signals with (seemingly) high probabilities of winning. I have yet to convert it into a strategy to test. The problem with “testing” my manual trading strategies is that my exits are very discretionary even if my entries are mostly not. But, I could go for a simple money management scheme and at least get a feel for what the entries test like that way. We’ll see. It’s only just now possible to even try it, thanks to the ‘elite functions’ opening up the needed indicators for use in strats.

Speaking of the elite series: The ‘elite’ set of functions and indicators I’ve released through eotpro is growing at a nice pace. To date, there are 7 more functions and 6 more indicators planned for the May release, and I know of a couple more I’m trying to fit in. Thanks to everyone who has subscribed, or is considering it. I hope you are enjoying all the new freedom it affords you when piecing together indicators and strategies. I know I am!

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