Hi all. I’m a bit busy at the moment trying to get the October releases of my eotpro products ready, and also doing some infrastructure enhancements to the blog. So, while you wait for me to speak up, why not read this interesting post from the Accrued Interest blog:

Why Main Street Should Support This Rescue. I really have no opinions on the bail-out stuff, other than the way it affects my trading. But, I have really enjoyed the Accrued Interest coverage of the sub-prime mess and its growing effects today. It’s explained very well for people (like myself) that don’t really have a detailed knowledge of the credit markets.

Here’s the latest indicator school video. Our presentation last night went over ninja, and some of Glen’s new coding efforts, and various bits of trading advice.

http://eotpro.acrobat.com/p37927330/

Enjoy!

I go over the full day, every trade, both entry and exit criteria, on my newest charts. Pretty freaking awesome, I think. :-)

Also, this post has some important trend-identification tips. Basically, if the candles are green and going up, the trend is up. If the candles are red and going down, then trend is down. I know it sounds like I’m being condescending, but the sad fact is most beginning traders over-think this stuff. In some ways, my best advice for the self-proclaimed “smart” traders out there is: stop thinking, start trading.

I’ll be going over this again later in the eotpro live room tonight for our indicator lesson night. People who attend will have a chance to ask questions and offer insights.

We played a game today in the eotpro live room, that I think I had seen in an article by Linda Bradford Raschke a long time ago. I’m not sure. [Edit: I found my original post on it here. Anyway, the idea is to pick a timeframe, and set a timer for some random amount of time near that timeframe. When the buzzer goes off, you must make a directional trade. And, you must stay in the trade for the amount of time you picked. Then, you repeat the process.

Obviously, you do this in a sim account!

The idea is, I think, twofold:

• You improve your market intuition. You can do this exercise with your indicators on, and you can do it with your indicators off to help you as a chart reader. You can do this exercise watching only the Level 2 quotes to improve your tape-reading ability. The possibilities are endless. And, since you are making trades, you are more likely to stay focused and interested in what you are doing. So many traders, myself included, can’t watch the markets without their eyes glazing over, if they are not trading.
• You get over your hesitancy to get in a trade. If you follow the rules, you must act… even if you are not sure of the market direction, you have to pick a side. I think this ability translates well when you go on to do actual trading. The best traders I know tend to have a market bias in their head even before their entry signal pops up. Then, they can act immediately when their intuition and their signals match. It’s a real advantage.

Doing this exercise at several time frames is useful, because your bias for the next 5 minutes will be different than your bias for the next 30 minutes, for example.

Anyway, my time in the live room covers the lunch hour, so we rarely get big moves while I’m on. In a low-volume environment, it’d be best to chose 10 minute windows, probably. To keep things exciting, though, we went for 2 minute windows. That is: I set a timer for 2 minutes. When it went off, the room voted to get in long or short. I got in and set a timer for 2 minutes. When the timer went off, I got out of the trade. Then I set a timer for two minutes to trigger our next entry.

Even in this horrible choppy section of the market:

We broke even exactly after 4 rounds. And, sadly, not 10 seconds after our last exit, the market surged in our favor. We would have had a big sim profit, if time were just shifted a short amount. Those are the breaks! We’ll probably play this game once a week or so, since people had fun.

Here’s the end of the day on my new charts. Don’t worry, you can still be manly and weep at the beauty of these signals.

As I told people in the eotpro live room, I am going to my first dance lessons tonight. Yeah, that’s not a typo. So, I don’t have time to post much, but here is an example trade from my screens today:

The new charts have been good lately! Today was pretty bland til the end of the day…. I showed people how I use my overview charts to gauge market direction… so people in the live room knew I was waiting for that short.

When I was first reading about stocks, trying to learn the game, they taught me how to spot manipulation and insider trading. They would show me something that looks like this pre-market picture:

Note the thousands of contracts sitting on the bid, since the market essentially ran out of sellers and the market went limit-up. hmm…. now look at the volume splitter on the pre-market chart:

The last bar shows a huge pre-market surge of buying. That is what we call “unusual pre-market activity” in the biz. It’s a sign that the market playing field isn’t very level at the moment.

I wonder who could be behind such unusual stuff, manipulating the way our markets work? Oh, it’s the freaking government. Damn. Now what?

Trader Mike said:

“When I said [short sellers] were sticking their faces into a buzz saw I had no idea the federal government would be the one holding the saw.”

Well put! This is ridiculous.

Everyone on earth is talking about the new rules, and I don’t care to add to the cacophany. I don’t really find it that interesting, except when it affects my own trading. So, I thought I’d show what I was looking at this morning… I have time to post, because I won’t be trading until I see how this initially shakes out. Be careful, out there.

I’m checking out Ensign Software’s charting platform, as we are interested in porting the eotpro.com indicators to it. So far, I’m having issues getting a real-time data feed for futures hooked up to it, but hopefully that will be resolved soon. Just looking around, I have to say it looks oddly familiar… I must have seen it featured on stock blogs in the past or something.

I was pretty impressed with the first indicator I tried to throw on the ES daily data… their auto trend indicator:

Turns out, we’re currently in a downtrend. Anyway, I don’t know if it’s updating those lines in real-time or not, but if so, it looks sweeter than a lot of autotrend indicators out there. So, that bodes well. I’m getting used to the interface, and can at least take a shot at coding an indicator or two on it, and see if I think it’s a viable platform for us. We’ll see… anyone out there using ensign?

This is for reader Jeff, who requested it. Sadly, I do not have time to write much about it, but I think the charts speak for themselves. We had a rough day in the EOTPro live room today, as there wasn’t a lot of follow-through on the moves on our normal charts. Basically treading water… win, lose, win, lose. My new experimental charts fared quite a bit better, which is encouraging! There were still a mix of wins and losses, but some of the wins were outstanding!

I’m a happy camper.

Anyway, here’s the charts up to a little after 3PM Eastern. I’ve got to run some errands and get ready for some social events tonight. Later.

I’m feeding live TS data into my ninjatrader chart this morning. I’ve had a couple Bill’s arrows show up:

Sorry that on these screenshots, they blend in a little with the paintbars. In future charts, I’ll color the arrows all Yellow or something, like I do on tradestation and multicharts. Of course, you can set the arrows to any color that you want when you subscribe! :-)

Bill’s Arrows on Ninja now has actual arrows. Actually, you can plot the arrows, or the typical entry dot in a subgraph, or both! I’ve made this kind of option on a couple of the ninjatrader indicators, and I find it really useful. Anyway, check it out:

Another feature I added is an option to turn on or off the bonds. This is for people that want to use Bill’s Arrows on markets that aren’t correlated to some other market. That’s come up before, among our tradestation customers.

I believe that was the last of the coding work for the October release. Testing/documentation phase began last night.

As if you weren’t jealous enough already, I thought I’d show you how the open went for my new charts on the ES futures:

Remember that each candle body on this chart is a point wide, and you can estimate how nice your morning can be with my EOTPro Elite Series indicators on your screen. :-)

Ok, I’m taking the rest of the day off, as usual. See you tomorrow!

This is actually the first ninjatrader indicator I wrote, to figure out how their programming interface would feel. I just remembered that I had the code earlier tonight, and that it was probably sitting somewhere on my hard disk. I found it!

You can see two box plays on this chart (the purple dots on price action outline the boxes, and the blue dots give the price targets). They both work, but the second one has more going for it, in that there is a Patty B signal and slightly better market sync bias at the breakout point.

I haven’t mentioned the box play in a while… if you are new, or don’t recall it, check out this post on the box play, which gives a pdf manual for using it. I know some people in the eotpro family use it with great success. I really like it, but it hasn’t found its way onto any of my charts in a while… hmm…

The volume splitter from the Elite Series is ported to ninjatrader now:

I’m running two copies of it in that screenshot, in the lower two panes. One is set to only show the large traders as a histogram. The other shows all three trader groups as dots. Very cool!

I’ve also been putting other final touches in place. Such as, all the paintbars give you an option to plot a row of colored dots instead of the actual paintbar. You can also plot both. And now, if you change the color of the dots, the paintbar color will change as well. It’s the little things that make the biggest difference, sometimes!

In this video, I go over the entire day on my new charts. I think they look pretty darn awesome. The best part of all is that I only showed the trading chart, irrespective of the context chart… I think it’s great that the trading chart does that well alone, without any more input.

Even if you were simple-minded, and took every single signal, you’d come out ok. I point out a couple of the signals that you obviously would want to avoid, in my opinion. But, count them all and you’ve still got a massive up day.

I will be very curious to see how the chart holds up over the next week. I don’t know if I have the energy to profile a stock today… anyone have any suggestions for stocks?