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Pensive for the last few days. Installed MC, MC.Net and NT on a new I7 dual monitor system today, logged into the cash account but traded NT sim all day when not watching trading videos, except for a couple of quick money-makers on the cash account. Not a whole lot of action during the N American session lately. Working on easing the kids into a family trading business while they're still impressionable--probably don't miss business so much as need an excuse not to pad around in a housecoat all day . Still somewhat under the weather--wish colds didn't mess with what little sleep I get.
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
Still off my game. Active on paper (thank goodness given today's gambling session) and stock/ETF swing trading on real money accounts--commodities only lately--but find these take far less mental presence than spot currency and excuse a greater margin of error (assuming one has the direction right at least). Probably will not trade real money until the urge to blow my nose every 2 minutes subsides and should stop trading altogether to avoid resuming some very bad habits.
Paper trading again today after a decent night's sleep, the focus on sticking like glue to the rules I know work, abandoning a recent foray into trading my limited understanding of price action at least until I've managed to digest the contents of Al Brooks' books (arrived yesterday). As might be expected things are going relatively well so far, and if I continue to stick to the rules fully expect things to go well for the rest of the session
Done for the day just prior to end of session. As planned stuck to trading plan rules more or less, although still managed to get distracted (e.g. by nexusfi.com (formerly BMT) posts ), still took a few iffy setups. As expected (when I felt it) the urge to chase price (like a cat wants to jump on a mouse) and to take revenge trades was strong, but those are 2 behaviours the trading plan steers me away from.
It was also hard to quit just before end of session when price was still moving. However the desire to trade was strong only because last trade exited prematurely (price hit trailing stop before 2nd target hit), then went on to touch where the target had been. Classic revenge urge, especially dangerous because waiting for an actual setup would have taken me past end of session, meaning more pressure to "get in now at any cost."
The urge to trade price action (my notion of price action right now kind of a murky soup of mumbo jumbo, feelings and unidentifiable urges likely more diagnostic of what I had for breakfast--pizza in this case--than potential price movement) was never an issue.
ETA: the relatively high P/L ratio of 72% tells me a) I was consciously trading the short time frame chart in the context of the medium time frame chart and b) price cooperated by trending most of the session.
Spent all night (re)configuring hardware and software, spectator today.
ETA: 16:00 AST. One of the sports I'm watching is 5 minute ES in light of what I've gleaned from reading Al Brooks. IMO ES price action is significantly different than spot EUR/USD tick bars (I can see features he talks about in ES, not so much in spot FX tick charts, although correlations may be useful) so will likely get back into ES when the time comes to practice what he preaches.
20:21 AST: Just dawned on me I'm comparing apples & oranges--the better comparison is with 5 minute Forex bars. D'oh. It may be whatever aspect of tick bars I depend on for "5 energies" trading is not present in time bars, just as time bars may be suitable for Al Brooks' method but not ideal for "5 energies". Still have work to do.
Still learning my way around Multicharts PowerLanguage, and one of the things it teaches is I'm a sucker for little refinements that I'm not used to with NT. In this case, debugging an indicator just now, when I hit "Compile" the changes to the indicator instantly appeared on all charts where it was installed. I like that
Having repurposed, remapped and repositioned a number of the computers in my home office over the last couple of days I spent the morning calming network hiccups that suddenly materialized (e.g., at one point TWS managed to lock my IB account after a number of automated retries to authenticate during startup and I had to ask IB support to kindly undo my handiwork :-/. It turned out I forgot to hardwire the new trading computer LAN IP, and the IP randomly assigned by DHCP did not match the IP hardwired in the router for ports 4000/4001, which TWS depends on). As usual, if it's up and you want to keep it up....
No currency trading the last few days, but am using ultrabear/bull ETFs as surrogates to "trade" CL on a cash account to become familiar with CL price action and to profit from the swing in crude price over the last couple of days. The difference between trading CL directly and trading the ETF is an approximate 8:1 P/L ratio between the 2 (i.e., for a given $$$/tick investment, profits and losses for the ETF are approximately 1/8 the P&L for the future). Kind of like training wheels. The other difference is the ETF is available only during N American market hours so I hesitate to hold a position over night.
Aside from wanting to capture profits I'm looking at CL as a possible alternate instrument as an antidote to impatience. Trading EUR/USD exclusively means I spend a fair amount of time sitting on my hands, and idle hands are the devil's plaything.
2 reasons I haven't been trading EUR/USD include the following:
1. Canadian thanksgiving is approaching and I'm spending time with family, including a brother I haven't seen in years, which IMO is pretty much all it's about; and,
2. The new trading computer is abending about once a day with a BSOD. Windbg analysis of the .DMP file show it's the likely the usual video driver problem (in this case atikmpag.sys is shooting itself in the head) so first step will be to flash the BIOS with a more recent driver for the video card if I can lay my hands on one, or perhaps remove the card altogether and go with the onboard chipset for now.
Easing out of Canadian Thanksgiving, still (over)trading CL using an ETF proxy on a cash account for the experience but managing to make money. Wish I could say the same about spot Euro. Still reviewing Barry Burns' training materials ("5 energies" system)--amazing to me how far I've strayed from the system. Yesterday and today experimented with my understanding of BB's advice about trading reversals (range and trend reversal trading), on paper sub 50% percent profitable,, 0.57 profit factor, Max consecutive losers 10 vs 9 consecutive winners, trading 1 lot 39 times lost $192.15. Bottom line is, just because we're "just practicing reversals" it doesn't make it OK to trade chop. If it's chop, recognize chop and either take the day off or use a chop technique.
Didn't do any reading today--"reading" in this case means Al Brooks.
Did dust off a fuzzy logic DLL project that intends to implement BB's system one day, in response to questions I've been getting about AI solutions. Still owe [MENTION=11447]NJAMC[/MENTION] a response to his question about how to train using AForge.Net--working on it in another browser window but short answer quite simple; use the following syntax to train a net:
where inputN and outputN are [][] arrays. Details are in the project file attached as a .Zip file to the first post of this thread. While the .Zip file contains a MS VS 2010 solution the source is directly accessible in the .Zip archive, file in question is Form1.cs. IIRC see code lines beginning at line 1187.
ETA: In other news watched spot EUR drop 50 pips while attending tonight's webinar. IMO the webinar well worth the cost
ETA: Mystery gap in 6E vs "continuous" spot over market close: