Now I have slept on my grumpy post, I feel I should respond to some of the replies and spill the beans on my post.
Scillaims, If you did reply, I missed your post. The program I use is called Ninja Trader and can be used as a charting package for free. It is currently in beta for a new version (version 7) and if you don't intend to trade with it, grab the beta version as the charting is much improved in the new release. You can feed it data from yahoo and google finance for free as well. I use 6.5 as a futures trading platform and feed it live data from a US futures broker. If you dig a little deeper it is possible to add Ozzie stocks and chart them as well. Ozzie stocks don't work "out of the box" though as it was written for US markets and futures/forex primarily.
EvilMonkey, yes the XJO thread does get pretty busy during market volatility and people do tend to get wound up as their backsides go on the line. You are spot on about the "regeneration" of the thread too. I definitely was a noob here a few years back and I have frequently expressed my gratitude to those that pointed me in the right direction. Now I know which direction is the right one, it is a source of frustration to see very little of the "right sort of discussion" happening here, hence my rant.
JA, glad to hear my Mav idea is still working for you. I have since discovered a momentum indicator helps identify which mav's are the more important ones. If you add a slow stoch to your chart and look for momentum peak and troughs, a few mav's will stand out as more important. The same works with patterns. A momentum indicator can help identify which trend lines will be the most important. I use my TSR momentum indicator but really any of the popular ones will do just as good a job.
Nine, if I use your analogy of post ratio's then 4/288 means I'm in the 2%. Not having a heart or a popular opinion probably means I am doing something right. Staying ahead in this game is bloody hard work and requires constant assessment of yourself and your trading. One of the reasons for my "whinge" is there is very little discussion on things that can influence trading positively. It has been a long time since I have seen someone post thoughts on back testing or stop positioning.
At JA's request I will spill the beans on my basic trend catching system. Firstly a little theory on what I am trying to achieve. I have found momentum trading is inherently counter trend trading. Pretty much every momentum system I have developed ends up trying to catch price action from an extreme and this typically happens after a good price move. Knowing this I set about trying to find a system that shows break outs from "noise" levels. Normal pattern break outs typically get tested or whipsawed so I wanted something that wasn't based on this. On most markets, once a good move starts it rarely comes back to test the start of the move. So if you aren't on it from the start, you never get a chance to get on it at the same price level.
So how to define noise? And fair value at the same time? I stumbled across it while just trying to show noise. What indicator dynamically adjusts to market volatility? Yep, Bollinger bands. Normal Bollinger bands are 2 standard deviations wide in an attempt to include most market action, except extreme cases. I didn't want to encompass most market action so I reduced the bollinger bands to 0.618 deviation width. Since the 100 Mav is regarded generally as a "fair value" on almost any time frame I tried that as a base for the bollingers instead of the standard 20. To my surprise, what I had generated seemed to show me where the chop is and where the trends started. A break out of the bands typically doesn't get tested either so it provides a nice low risk entry. You can enter and quickly move your stop to BE with a low risk of your BE stop being hit and price generally keeps moving away. If you get hit quickly at BE, generally the break wasn't a the start of a big move and you wanted out anyway.
Today's job is to get the backtesting working properly to give me some accurate results for this system. The main problem is I'm trying to use a stop order to enter the position and my coding is a little lacking in this department.
Anyway, back to the point of my "whinge", this sort of stuff is the bread and butter of any real trader. While I don't normally post the specifics of my systems or specific trades, I feel the conversation here needs more of the edge discovery process and less of the economic forecasting. Don't get me wrong, following the big picture economics is important too, it's just not the information you should be using to trade on.
REAL traders trade what their system tells them to, and use predefined risk management. Any other method is doomed to fail imho.
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