I still haven’t been able to make a video that youtube won’t mangle… so today we’ll go with a screenshot.

Three signals, two viable. This leads to two trades for two nice wins. A nice way to end the week! The entry points are at the vertical lines, and the profit taking areas are at the ellipses.

Why isn’t the middle one viable? As you know, my only criteria once I get a signal dot is “are we trending against Alla’s Average?” (the yellow line over price action). In that middle signal, you can see we were nowhere near Alla’s Average. I tell people that in a trend, we will pull away from Alla’s Average, then chop back towards it, then pull away again. That’s exactly what happened, and as you can see, it’s very stress-free to grab the two big pushes down if you are patient enough to wait for them.

Even if your judgment faltered, and you took the middle signal, note that bonnie’s bar color (in the first subgraph) turned green almost right away, which would be your signal to bail on the short trade with a tiny loss. Yeah, my charts are like a well-oiled machine! :-)

Have a good long weekend, everyone… I’ll see you Wednesday (even on long weekend weeks, I take Tuesdays off!).

Today was ok but not great. 3 trades for 2 wins and one loss. But, the second win was only 2 ticks, and only because an experimental eotpro.com indicator scared me out just in the nick of time.

My last few videos have been mangled by youtube. They must have “upgraded” their transcoding process. I hope this one plays correctly… I used a different codec this time. If it doesn’t work, then I apologize and I’ll try yet another codec tomorrow!

I quit around noon central time, ahead of the FOMC minutes chop and eventual madness. Good luck, if you continue to trade in it!

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Sorry it’s been a couple days since I’ve written a post. I went to visit my parents around Mother’s Day, and took Monday and Tuesday off. What can I say? I’m lazy! I should be trading tomorrow.

Looks to me like the action today really sucked, at least for my trading style. I would have taken a small loss, and then had a smaller gain, if I had traded today. So I guess it’s lucky that I didn’t!

Anyway, here’s an ad I posted on the tradestation forums today, for the eotpro elite series of functions I’m offering to the public. I point out the way we use Bonnie’s Bar colors to bail on failing trades early. In this example, I show a 1-tick loss followed by a much larger gain. Better than my actual trading chart did, today!

Low volume, choppy day again. But with a conservative methodology like mine, you can still find a couple good entry points. Just takes patience and will-power! :-) See you next week.

Today there was a rare, obvious ascending triangle play on ES. I don’t ever see those, it seems like! More often on ES are things like cup+handle, and Head&Shoulders. So that was kinda neat.

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A lot of people have been chopped up, or unable to find trades the last few days. I’m happy to say that I’ve had very few signals, but they’ve all been very good. I go over that in this video. So, if you are getting chopped up a bunch, you may want to consider techniques like I am using. These include, making sure price is trending against a good support/resistance like Alla’s Avg, only taking trades with a healthy estimated risk:reward, staying on the right side of a fresh VWAP, etc. If you’ve been watching my videos, you know the drill.

It takes patience to trade this way, for sure. If I felt pressure to pull the trigger every 30 minutes, I’d probably be hurting this week, too. When you think about it, though, the market’s not here to please you or entertain you. You need to trade on the market’s terms, which means you need to trade when it’s willing to give you easy money, and only then. Think about it.

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This one’s for you, Rafal!

This will go into the May release. It’s a complement to the existing functions for identifying divergences. This one identifies hidden divergences.

This is just one more example of how waiting for the best signals can make your trading a lot less stressful. It’s so funny, because not long ago I was taking a lot more trades. Maybe I will feel like that again one day. But for me, the name of the game in 2008 has been relaxation. I have multicharts filter out all but the most promising signals, and I know in advance where my profit targets are. Feels good.

Of course, I (or you!) could adjust the settings to make the signals much more aggressive, or you could run it on a faster chart, etc.

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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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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.

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 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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Someone was asking me how easy it is to make a basic strategy out of the elite function series I am offering through eotpro.com. In particular, their mail said:

Do you have an example strategy with the Easy Language code that utilizes some of the Elite functions? …. For instance take the first PattyB signal after a bias line change, but only if Market Sync is with the trade.

My response:

…here is a strategy that gets in on the first patty b after a bias line change, if market sync is with it. It keeps a stop 2 ticks behind the last plot cycle, and gets out if it shows $200 profit:

vars:
pb(0),
ms(0);

// set up the indicators
pb = $rtFirstNPattyBs(…pattyb input values…);
ms = $rtMktSyncPredict;

// entry rules
if(pb = 1) and (ms >= -1) then buy next bar at market;
if(pb = -1) and (ms <= 1) then sell short next bar at market;

// keep a stop beyond last plot cycle
sell next bar at $rtPlotCycleStopL(2) stop;
buy to cover next bar at $rtPlotCycleStopS(2) stop;

// take $200 if we can get it
setprofittarget(200);

That’s not intended for real-world use! But, it’s an example of how simple things are simple, with these building blocks. The kinds of things that eotpro clients tend to ask for are packaged up, ready to be dropped into a strategy or custom indicator. Stuff that trips up non-programmers, like tracking the bias line and making sure you only take one signal (and only if it’s within the first few bars after the bias change, etc.) is all taken care of for you.

It’s been a while since I’ve done a live trade. This one wasn’t too spectacular (1.25 pt winner across 2 contracts). Why is it that the live trades always take 8 minutes, while a lot of my trades are over in 30 seconds?!? But, it does show off the murray math lines, and is a typical way I manage a countertrend trade.

Update: it turns out that price went down to my second target EXACTLY… so maybe I’d have been filled or maybe I wouldn’t have. But, I’m happy with my decision to exit either way.

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I show some charts, talk about my seminar, and talk about my hellish night of power outages and faulty fire alarms.

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Every Thursday night, the eotpro folks hold “indicator night,” where they go over their indicators and answer questions from clients and guests. Well, last night, I gave about an hour seminar on the new functions and indicators I’ve been working on. And, it was recorded!

Here’s the link to the streaming video:

http://eotpro.acrobat.com/p79376846/

Watch it. Because I said so!

The first half hour is Bill going over the major eotpro indicators, and then I come on and go over a big chunk of the new stuff I’ve put together for them. If you just want my portion, you can seek to it, but if you are unfamiliar with the eotpro indicators you’ll probably find that first part interesting as well. Even though it’s over an hour, we still didn’t touch on everything.

It’s a big package I’m releasing, full of things that people have been requesting from me, based on my videos. And, until now, I’ve always had to turn them down… either because the needed functions were not there, or because I do not release indicators I use to put food on my table for free. Both of those issues have been taken care of now, and I’m pretty happy with the reception I’ve gotten and the excitement generated so far. I’ve been getting phone calls from around the world asking about the availability of these indicators. Good for my ego, not so good for my phone bill.