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Yes that is what I have been doing up til now. I kept them all on a spreadsheet and found it laborious and error-prone. I started getting desperate for automation. I heard from Sierra Chart users that transferring S&R levels from one chart to another is a built-in functionality - I figured I wasn't going to change but I should be able to program it easily enough.
That's a very interesting observation and I should pay attention to it. I think I might be misunderstanding you though because I'm never sure what the terminology "to test" means when talking about a level. Do you mean that a test is just a touch or not even that, a price move that bounces off the level? As distinct from a break-out failure? Or does "to test" make no implication of the result of what happens when price arrives there, it just means price arrives and then whatever happens next is something else?
And bar 294 as well! You are bloody amazing! That is awesome. I will never attempt to trade a break-out on the last bar of the hour again!
Seriously though reflecting on it a bit more, I will watch that - somehow I will try to remember it, although I can see it being easy to forget.
However the 50period 60min MA? Naaaah how many traders are watching that? I stick with the 20 period EMA on the 3min chart because first Al Brooks uses the 20 period EMA - although he uses it on the 5min chart on the E-Mini - but it does seem to be useful.
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
The observations that I made are definitely not gospel but I'm sure you take them with grain of salt, as you very well should. What works for me may not work for you. With that disclaimer, the latter half of your understanding is correct,"Or does "to test" make no implication of the result of what happens when price arrives there, it just means price arrives and then whatever happens next is something else?" I have simply observed that if price is close to, say, an hourly level near the top of the hour, it will generally try to move price to that level or through. As for the MA's, they are the only indicator I use in my trading. Early last year, I looked at hourly charts for quite some time and tried to figure out which MA best marked major market swings. It seemed that when price raised or fell precipitously through the 50 hourly SMA it usually ran for awhile. Of course, nothing is 100% in trading and sometimes it acts more as a magnet than anything, especially when it is flat and price simply gyrates around it. But I have found enough use to keep it on my charts since the markets seem to want to probe the price when it is in the area. I have also found the 20ema to be useful on most timeframes. There is an indicator for NT which draws a longer timeframe MA on a shorter timeframe chart called VisualSMA. I use Tradestation on my other machine and created an indicator myself, which seems to be more accurate but I'm unsure why. Anyway, here is a snapshot of a 5min chart today with 50HMA(cyan) and 20 5min-ema (fuchsia).
This indicator is a major time-consumer. Discovered I can't get good performance by drawing lines in NT7 - at least not the number I want to draw - and that once drawn, the lines are bug-ridden and sometimes disappear if too wide off the screen.
I checked out the nexusfi.com (formerly BMT) local Murrey Math indicator and that indie uses a custom Plot() method which I have to copy if I want to overcome this performance issue, and draw sensible labels for the S&R lines too.
Switched to the market at 13:00 to have a quick fix of Price Action but I didn't do well this time. Not that I'm even sim-trading, just watching, but I was all bullish and overrode my intuition on that basis. Had a bad feeling of anxiety as the clock ticked down to the US news release. I couldn't pin down what it was, the only thing I could think of was that I
was afraid I would be wrong (since I'm just observing, there could be no losses involved) but I couldn't put my hand on my heart and swear that I knew what I was worried about.
I was just making rational deductions about the market state and what my bias should bed - and feeling unhappy about something unknown to do with the market. Got the bias wrong and gave up after the market fell through the day's low.
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
Same on this end. The break and strength of it were unexpected. I kept expecting support to hold and some sort of a retracement but we only got 10-15min small bounces all the way down. After it breaks support you think," ok it will retest that level and I can get in on second opportunities" but it never does. Then you think, "I should just get in but this is probably the bottom; after all, it has run so far." This happened to me the whole way down.
I had a bug in my NT7 indicator template and while experimenting with my new indicator, my chart kept on getting the big red X of death. I sorted it out eventually with help from NT support.
Today looks like it's going to be a range day, after the bears appeared to re-enacting yesterday's sell-off and got badly kicked back.
There were several points where I could have got in on trades only to be stopped out for a couple of ticks profit or loss, both long and short, but by the end when the bulls finally became inarguably in control, I had lost concentration thanks to the issue with the charts.
I figure a lot of traders were annoyed at themselves - just like me and @SammyD - at missing the big sell-off yesterday, so there was a lot of nervousness about what looked like the same thing happening today, causing a lot of traders to go jumping in and overexaggerating the bearish moves.
This is the kind of day where just watching really doesn't cut it. There was so much going on, I could hardly keep up, so what my trading would have been like, I hate to think. I guess I should make a rule that I don't trade if I am having technical problems with the platform. Ideally I would have a second laptop ready to go for this situation so that it doesn't stop me trading properly, but that's only going to happen (according to my plan) once I reach profitability.
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
Funny, I took one look at the Euro and Pound this morning and decided to trade the Pound. Some fantastic moves. Just out of curiosity @Adamus, what time do you think most banksters in London pack up for the weekend? There was a major sea change at 11am EST (4pm GMT) and I'm wondering if that was it.
There used to be a time when business would stop at around about 12pm when they all went down the pub and didn't come back until Monday, but in the modern era I don't think there's the same kind of herd instinct. If they've got something to do, they do it, they have to be totally professional, and I guess that most of the big players are banks that have a forex book which they pass between local offices around the world from Hong Kong to London to NY and back again. London could hand-over to NY at any time after 2pm so I guess packing it in for the weekend at 4pm could be what happens when there's nothing big going on.
I used to communicate with a forex dealer at Deutsche Bank but he dropped off the radar a couple of years back. I should take more care of my contacts
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
Good day for practice. Challenging. Never did what I thought it would do without doing something else first, a bit like one of those circus bikes where you have to steer the wrong way.
Having fun with the support & resistance indicator. I didn't realise how many S&R lines I was just ignoring and not drawing on my charts previously. Of course the indicator doesn't ignore a single line - they are all there, practically 5 or 6 for everyday shown on the chart. I'm going to see if I can build in parameters to kill off any of the lines I'm not interested in. Either that, or I have to find a way of creating zones instead of lines.
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
Never checked my payments to Ninjatrader seriously - you know, it's just one of those payments that comes out of my account regularly. Discovered that I had forgotten about the second license I had leased while I was running my mechanical trading systems on a remote server. I never cancelled it when I shut down the system, and now I see I've been paying for it for over a year since, $180 a quarter down the plug hole.
I also checked the lifetime license - it would have been cheaper from the start but I never thought about it again after making the initial decision. Another $1000 or so down the plug hole.
Just checked Ninjatrader's refunds policy - in brief: no mercy for idiots, no refunds for anyone, thank you.
Guess I'll just cancel the auto-renew paypal subscriptions and wait until their automatic license checking blocks the app, then I'll make my mind up whether to buy or not - i.e. will I need NT7 for another 18 months or not....
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.