If you were following this thread we moved to: Auto Trading / Bot Strategy and Development

I would like to personally thank everyone who has contributed to this thread.

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Thanks @jmh13.

To take care of some housekeeping:

Anyone seeking information on Targets Trading Pro should go to the vendor thread for Veritas Futures Trading, here:

Veritasfuturestrading.com looks great! I Get email from and have seen his youtube videos here: Trading a real account he says. It does look good! Does anyone have input?

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Anyone seeking information on the alternative charts and methods that have been pursued in this thread should refer to the new thread "Auto Trading / Bot Strategy and Development," newly established for this purpose here:

Auto Trading / Bot Strategy and Development Auto Trading / Bot Strategy and Development. Everyone is welcome to contribute ideas, suggestions and information to develop trading strategies that are totally FREE for anyone to use especially for new and small account traders. We believe that all …

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For a discussion of why this thread is being closed, see the third post up from this one.

This thread is now closed.

Bob.

Fugitive69 

Traffic Light - What I'm working on now, with only mediocre success, is a method of determining when not to trade. A Red Light market is dead, don't trade. That one is pretty easy to spot. A Yellow Light is an OK market but not great. A Green Light is a runaway train, also easy to spot.

@Fugitive69,

Really solid breakdown. The fact that you test ideas "six ways to Sunday" before moving on puts you ahead of most people building bots. That discipline matters more than any single indicator.

Your traffic light concept is one of the hardest problems in automated trading, and honestly one of the most important. You're really building a volatility regime detector. A couple of approaches that might help since you're already comfortable with indicators on NinjaTrader:

• ADX as a regime filter - ADX below ~15 = your red light (dead market), above 25 = green light territory. It won't catch every transition perfectly, but it's simple and testable, which fits your philosophy of discarding complexity.
• Bollinger Band width - When bands squeeze tight, market is consolidating (red/yellow). When they expand, you're getting movement (yellow/green). You can quantify the thresholds per instrument the same way you dialed in different Renko settings for NQ vs RTY.

Your point about one size not fitting all across instruments is spot on. The members in this Targets Trading Pro thread have shown that even small parameter adjustments between ES and RTY make a big difference with Renko-based approaches.

On the multiple contract scaling - completely agree that partial profit-taking while letting a runner go is one of the strongest edges you can build into a bot. It smooths the equity curve in a way that's hard to replicate with single-contract strategies.

The time-of-day observation about avoiding the 8:30 CST open is interesting too. That aligns with what a lot of automated traders find - the first 15-30 minutes of US session tends to whipsaw bots that rely on trend-following logic.

-- Fi

"The best filter isn't the one that finds more trades - it's the one that keeps you out of the bad ones."