Jun 5

This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com


Catch the Trade

My primary method of trading is based on an adaptive moving average crossover. The method attempts to catch intraday moves of .75 cents or more on equities, limiting losing trades to around .20 cents and maintaining about 50% profitables trades. The system works well, but many false signals are generated that are difficult to filter out, without also filtering out the type of moves I am looking to catch. Some filtering can be done, but the system is still left with too many false signals that need visual confirmation to ignore or act on.

Some signals are generated that are neither false or positive, and are neutral with an undetermined direction, that later become profitable. Because I have signals coming from TradeStation, and Trade Ideas, a neutral signal can be easily lost, as another signal is generated, and another chart needs to be reviewed. Discovering later that the neutral signal became positive, and generated considerable profit can be frustrating. It was a move I should have been in on, and I was not.

I have solved this problem by creating an indictator that tracks positive profit on a position, and creates an alert and a visual per bar profit indicator that allows for subsequent entry as a trade becomes profitable. An additional benefit is that a neutral signal can be dismissed, knowing that an alert will be generated if it does become profitable. This simple method has allowed me to eliminate missing strong moves where the signal was generated early.

In the attached screen shot, a short is generated, and a red cross is created, The next two bars, the trade was negative, and yellow bars were created. On the fouth bar, the trade became profitable (green), and gained profitablity as the trade continued until its signal exit.

- TraderD


This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com


May 10

This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com


I created Quotetracker paintbars for the HMA/PPO/SMI set up I blogged about yesterday. The setup waits for alignment of the HMA, PPO and SMI in the same direction. The paintbars are added to allow better visual identification. You have to wait for this setup to develop, so you will not get whipped sawed on HMA changes.

The paintbar code is provided below.

The example attached catches a $2.00 move on TSO this morning. The way I normally trade this is on a change, in the direction of the market bias. If the market would not have been weak, the first daily change short would have been ignored, waiting the the next change up. You can see this also caught a move in the same stock yesterday afternoon. TSO is one of the stocks from the scan I posted yesterday, run this morning.

The stocks this morning where AL, AMZN, BNI, FSLR, FWLT, MRO, NYX, PBR, SPWR, TSO, UBB, UTHR, VLO. I assume people can run the scan, or modify as they wish, so I will not be posting it anymore.

HMA, PPO, SMI Paintbars

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This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com


May 8

This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com


My trading is driven from Trade Ideas alerts, and so I need to be able to decide quickly on whether to take or reject a trade, and how to manage the trade once I am in it. Sometimes a signal from Trade Ideas comes a little early to trade, but may be tradeable in a few bars. I need to manage this, and react if the trade does become viable.

To meets these needs, I developed a set of visual and auditory indicators within Tradestation to help manage trade events. To provide good visual clues, I have a color coded Hull Moving Average laid over the price bars. When it is green, the bias is long, and when red the bias short. Just below is a second panel which is also color coded green or red to re-enforce the trend direction. Above and below this are trade entry and exit markers (Enter long, short below, and exit long, short above).

The next lower panel is a forward normalized moving average histogram, which is not effected by gap openings common when trading intraday. Strength changes are color coded, weak going to strong and strong going to weak, to prevent going the wrong way even through the trend still showing a bias up or down.

The final panel is a SMI used to trigger trades or exits.

For auditory alerts, I have added ringtones specific to the event: Enter Long, Enter Short, Exit Long Exit Short. When I am not in front of the system, I still know what needs to be done by the type of ring type generated.

This setup allows me to manage multiple active positions, or pending positions without using broker based rules which I do not like to use except for stop loss triggers.

Ideas for improvements would be great, or other methods that have been successful.

Intra Day Trade Panel

-TraderD


This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com


Mar 13

I haven’t blogged about it much, but I’ve spent some time formalizing the types of trades I take a little better, so that I can classify them and run statistics on them individually. I’m also hoping this will help me eliminate impulse trades, and stick to only the setups I’ve chosen to trade. Starting in March, I’m going to report on expectancy/winrate/profit_factor on each trade type individually.

Also, I have been thinking that, as I add new types of trades to my repertoire, I’ll start on a trial basis. I’ll trade them at 1/2 size until I have 20 trades in my journal. At that point, I’ll have stats to help me decide whether to keep it, or stop taking those trades. We’ll see if I have that kind of discipline, when the time comes :-)

These are the trade types I have racked up, this year so far:

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