My progress as a full-time investor & trader

INDICATOR CRAZY ... SOMETHING I THINK WE ALL GO THROUGH


I mentioned earlier that there was a period of several months during which I think I became indicator crazy, I think there are a lot of people that can relate. In this time I collected and developed just about every far fielded concept I could think of.


The sample belows shows a small set of the 90+ indicators I developed in that period. They were built in my search for finding and building profitable EAs although I can honestly say that I have not been able to develop profitable systems based on these indicators ... but some of the potentially profitable EAs I have built do use some of these indicators in some ways.


Note: Unlike my friend Hanover, I won't share these indicators .. why? because I think this will lead to a lot of headaches that I am not prepared for. Apart from this there are in most cases publicly available indicators that do the same things. So please don't ask.


So what is the point of showing these indicators? .. Well coming up with uniques ideas for indicators and building and testing them leads to also coming up with some very interesting concepts for trading which are not traditional ... and it's through the development of many indicators that I was able to come up with new ideas and quickly trial and back test non traditional ideas. So although in and of themselves there is no holy grail ... I think it has been an important part of the journey for me.
Note: to EA builders ... all of the indicators I have developed are EA friendly or have EA friendly versions hence they can be utilised by EAs for testing strategies.




"Channel" - a non-repainting standard deviation channel which intelligently applies the channel from the beginning of the trend only.


You know when you draw a standard deviation channel and you need to set the beginning to the first candle in the trend and then you need to keep updating the channel indicator to take into account each new candle and hence know where the SD top and bottom is? Well this does it for you. It also can use any polynomial regression level - if you like a more curvy fit .. and it doesn't repaint.

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"Ranges" - Shows the upper and lower daily range based on a ATR MA. i.e. when price approaches the upper line then it means it's reached it's average daily move.

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"SD Trail" - a Stop Loss trailing method that calculates Sam Seiden Supply and Demand Levels and uses them to trail price. Note: It uses my own approach to working out Sam Seiden levels.

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"SD" - my own implementation of Sam Seiden levels ... yes I know there are a lot of ways of working these out and no doub't someone will disagree with the levels I have shown ... but it's the best implementation I have personally used and it doesn't repaint like another well known one. These levels are fairly remarkable and I use them in my discretionary approach to trading under the right context.

Note: The levels are drawn real time on the RHS of chart .. they become invalidated and stop drawing on first touch

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Session Ranges and Corresponding OO - Similar to ranges, but this indicator shows the ATR MA for different sessions (in this case yellow-Asia, red-London, blue-New York) as can be seen the Asian session has a much smaller range then the other two. .. on the bottom is the same data shown as a percentage of range. This indi is also daylight saving "proof".

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"Consolidation" .. this indicator identifies consolidation or range areas. It is also possibly one of the most useful indicators I have developed and is based on Standard Deviation.

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I'll post a few more later on.

Ok, the post that disappeared was simple enough. Only 2 paragraphs sharing some impressions and stressing the importance of mim2005’s wealth and diversification posts.



Wealth:
While reading the post on wealth, I couldn’t but think of a documentary I once watched on JD Rockfeller. The man ran his personal finances methodically like a profit oriented business. Gradual accumulation of savings allowed him to build a capital base to start business. The core idea in there is that a rich man lives below he’s means. Someone wise once said a penny saved is a penny earned and I find that very true. Another related idea when discussing this topic is that wealth, discipline, and patience usually move together. Someone who fails at building a proper capital base through saving is very likely lacking in key personal characteristics (discipline, patience) required for running a long term successful business. Like you said were the world's wealth redistributed equally, given time those who were rich would become rich again.


Diversification:
Through our (my team's) brief journey through forex, there are two things we consider had a high impact on the way we trade. Automation and diversification are both highly desirable, because each contributes independently to achieve the smoothest fastest ascending equity curve possible. From the two, diversification benefits were a little harder to grasp, because it requires a deep understanding of drawdown effects, and accepting it implies denying the generalized idea (myth) that having a profitable strategy (a single edge) is enough to achieve success in this business. Instead, success (consistent profits with low drawdown) required multiple edges = workload increased. Not only that, but these edges have to be combined in the way that best reduces drawdown = workload increased. Suddenly, money management becomes a lot more complex too = workload increased. You see where am getting at.



If the post didn't disappoint, I promise next one will Later,
d

ENSURING INDICATORS ARE EA FRIENDLY

Apologies if I jump around a little in this journal but since mentioning custom indicators in the last post I thought it worthwhile making a point in regards to indicators being EA friendly.

If your pro the back testing of strategies via the use of EAs then one of the challenges you regularly encounter is that many indicators produce "objects" on the screen that cannot easily be "referenced" by an EA. This was a persistent problem that I had when trying to back test different approaches.

So fairly early in my indicator crazy stage I decided that I would only ever develop indicators that could be useful to an EA for back testing purposes, otherwise I felt I was wasting my time. One way developers like myself can do this is by making the indicator provide it's data via Indicator Buffers (time series rather than objects on screen).

One of the more interesting examples of this is if you ever decide to develop an Indicator that feeds Support and Resistance levels to an EA .... So here is an example of how I approached this problem.


DEVELOPING AN EA FRIENDLY SUPPORT/RESISTANCE INDICATOR

I started looking at many SR indicators publicly available and found hanover's Recent SR to be one of the best. So I decided to develop a proof of concept around some ideas I had in regards to on the fly SR generation around a "window" of time.


Unfortunately before I could really begin the work I needed to quickly write up a basic SR indicator, so after reading some of the doco’s around Recent SR I wrote something that was very simple but essentially followed a very similar approach, namely to detect high frequency (or density) extremes and obvious highs and lows.

STEP 1: NO FRILLS SR

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It produces results very similar to Recent SR and is relatively light weight and without any of the polish or user friendly functions that Recent SR has.


I wanted to keep it light as I knew that it would need to be used for many different time frames at the same time by an EA (M,W,D) and I didn't want it to be too processor intensive.


The next step was more difficult – how to get it to work on the fly and provide values in an EA friendly way, so I thought, wouldn’t it be great if I modified it to display only the four nearest resistances above the current price and the fours nearest support below the current price.


Of course an issue remain on what type of time window I could use, I decided to keep a rolling real time windows but after trying it I found it was very processor intensive and not really necessary as SR levels for example at a monthly time frame don’t change often. So as a happy in-between I decided to work on a concept of a rolling windows which is updated only after X amount of time.


One of the key challenges came around how the system would decide on the strength of each SR – but more importantly which would be the 8 strongest nearby SRs to use.


Next the indicator produced something like this ...

STEP 2: SR SHOWN VIA BUFFERS

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So the next step from here was to create an MTF version so I could see for example the key monthly levels on the 1hour chart …. This lead to another version of the indicator which produced an output like this...

STEP 3: MULTI TIME FRAME VERSION

This is showing monthly dynamic SR levels on a daily chart.

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STEP 4: FINAL SR INDICATOR - COMBINING MAJOR TIME FRAMES


The by running the indicator 3 times one for Monthly, one for Weekly and one for daily on an hourly chart you can see the results .. note white thick = monthly, gray medium thickness = weekly, thin dark gray = daily.

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It tends to highlight key SR levels remarkably well … but most importantly all of the lines you see are worked out with only the information available at that point in time by the SR. Hence the vertical lines represent the points at which the indicator has recalculated SR at the beginning of a new “Window”


Hence any bounces you see off the lines subsequently are real forecast bounces so to speak .. i.e. no repainting or drawing lines after the fact.


The EA is able in this case to have access to the nearest 8 monthly, 8 weekly and 8 daily levels and make decision accordingly .. i.e. To use to assist in determining where to place SLs etc.

By going through this type of process you can have your EAs make use of SR levels for determining SLs, Take Profit Targets etc.




Take Care,

mim2005

Hi vox dei,

Wow how disappointing ....












Just kidding


Completely agree with you on both points. Invariably doesn't matter which way you look at it discipline, hard work and patience is always required. That's why I'm convinced you pretty much have to love doing this work because if you don't you simply won't have the passion to persevere through the challenges.



Cheers,
mim2005

Yup, forex is pretty much like being with a woman, haha

Hi Mim will be reading through the thread and following. David is doing some work for me as I'm sure you know. Keep up the good work.

Hi Claudia1,

Great to have you along and I think you're in excellent hands with hanover, IMHO I think he's one of the best developers on the forum

I'll follow your thread and look forwards to see how it's going.

Wish you lots of pips,


Take care,

mim2005

Hey thanks have a good weekend.

MECHANICAL EA TRADING VS DISCRETIONARY TRADING

Hi all,

One of the aims of this journal for me is to reflect on my progress over the last year and a half and to some extent clarify in my own mind what the next stages I need to go through should be.

This journal also gives me the opportunity to share insights I believe are worthwhile for others facing similar challenges.

When I first studied forex I was 'scared' of learning fundamentals and I figured that there were a lot of professionals that new fundamentals much better than I could learn and hence I focused on trying to find purely technical methods which I felt would be my strength.

I was also quite fearful of the psychological challenges of trading and hence mechanical systems appear enticing to me, it seemed as though I could let them trade without having to worry too much about the stresses involved when dealing with real money.

In retrospect I now see that I was begin naive and really to reach the type of level that I am aiming for I need to have had experience with all aspect of trading as each provide something to learn from which is an edge in itself.

After spending so much time on EAs I was pretty much burnt out by the process so I decided to run with what I had at the time. I figured that the EAs I had worked on had a fairly good chance of being profitable in live environments and that I needed to get to the point of having them running full time on live accounts.

DISCRETIONARY TRADING

It was at this point that I decided to put everything I'd learned aside and focus on learning a discretionary trading approach. Of course I didn't want to have to come up with my own, that would take too long and I faced the same challenges I think most other traders go through in having to select a discretionary course from between the thousands of likely unprofitable courses available in trading. I spent a long time reading through countless reviews and reading the feedback of students etc. and eventually I came across a course that seemed to be 'legitimate'.

Although the course focused on day trading the eMini S&P which was out of my comfort zone, I knew that broadening my experience was a positive thing so I jumped into some serious study which spanned about 2 to 3 weeks of full time work. One of the things that attracted me most to the course was that it was run by mentors that traded professionally for a living every day.

Wow ... this was a real eye opener for me. It pretty much turned my thinking up side down in regards to how professionals trade. The training DID NOT include just about any of the things I had learned in traditional technical analysis, practically no indicators, no candle patterns, no waiting for confirmation, nothing! On a positive note it did confirm what I had found out in my own development of EAs namely that there was no significant edge in traditional technical analysis by itself.

The three biggest learnings I personally had from the course were broadly:

A) CONTEXT: Everything you do needs to be framed in the CONTEXT of the market at the time your trading. You need to be able to understand they key elements real time including, long medium and short term trends/ranges, other related markets and their context, price action, additional real time non price derived data and sentiment.

Frankly this is quite scary to someone who is looking for a system that can simply provide them with a few "good setups" to trade and personally I was very daunted by it because it looks difficult and prone to misinterpretation ... how would I know if I was doing it correctly!


B) ADAPT TO RANGING AND TRENDING ENVIRONMENTS: don't only focus on one or the other. In my work on EAs I mainly focused on trend following systems as I was constantly told these are the most profitable. The discretionary training taught me to recognise and take advantage of both types of markets. The challenge has now become how to recognise one from the other and be able to switch gear/approach as required.


C) ALWAYS THINK IN ODDS AND SCENARIOS: don't take a rigid mental position that the market for example is definitely moving up today. If theres one thing I've well and truly learned it's that nobody knows what the hell the market is going to do exactly on the day. You need to create MULTIPLE scenarios and plan how you will ADAPT your style to suit how the day evolves. You need to look at every opportunity in regards to what a given location is offering to you in terms of odds playing out and risk to reward.

What I am coming to realise is that to be a great discretionary trader requires you to embrace the difficulty and complexity of the market because ultimately it remains profitable ONLY BECAUSE most people can't do it.

I have only been trading discretionarily on a live account for about a month so far and I am slowly getting better on my psychology, analysis and execution (I've made plenty of mistakes). In this relatively short time my experiences and the types of trades I have been involved in is convincing me that this is likely to be quite a profitable exercise and I think the approach I am using has more potential than the EAs I have developed.

The truth is that it's too early to tell as yet. One month of trading means nothing in the scheme of things, but I have committed to giving this a solid go. I will be trading this approach for a six month period every week day for about 6 hours. Unfortunately trading the US market hours for me means working on my other investment and trading from midday in the afternoon and early evening and then live trading from 11pm my time to 5am .... and then sleeping till midday. I have been doing this for about 4 weeks now but I need to find a better work/life balance longer term.

Take Care,

mim2005

UPDATE ON LIVE EA RESULTS SO FAR

Hi all,

First thanks to those that have sent PM with encouragement, it's what makes posting worthwhile I've had some good feedback and chats with a few people off post and am learning a few different ways of looking at things.


For those that are keen to see how the trading robots are going ... below are some screen shots from myfxbook.



As you can see from the results the equity curve is highly dependant on whether the EURUSD tend to trend or not. So far over the last 4 weeks or so we've had a fairly tight ranging market and the robots have tended to draw down as expected ... although interestingly not as much as in the back test and this is probably because the backtest assumed a 1.8pip spread whilst the live account uses a much lower spread hence the draw down is less steep. Well that my explanation anyway!

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For those that are curious about the discretionary training I discussed in my previous post there are a few things to note:

a) I have no affiliation with the guys that run the course but I am a current member of the training (it's only one of several training courses I have purchased over the last year).
b) I cannot vouch for the trading style and content, it is new too me and I found it extremely useful for learning discretionary trading but this doesn't mean that others will find it the same.
c) Personally I think it's highly tailored for eMini S&P day trading which may not be something that a lot of member of forex factory do.
d) Important: I am not yet consistently profitable with the strategy and hence really have no basis to be able to recommend it ... although I will provide an update /review if people are interested after the six months.

That being said the course is http://www.opentrader.com/

In my next post I will discuss my take on some of the differences between trading eMini S&P500 and forex.

Cheers,

mim2005

good updates.seems your research is very thorough.I have visited the opentrader site and ive seen they teach about market profile.I have been dabbling in it myself using both time and volume profile from futures.I even have the MIND OVER MARKETS BOOK that is regarded as one of the best on market profile.I saw a dude here(lubo labo/Enricofx) make 2000%+ using volume profile with very little risk...he ignored all my PMs LOL!!!

There are a few threads on M.P but I found this to be the best http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j...53899372,d.ZG4

also check out rabids posts on MP http://www.forexfactory.com/showthre...04#post2747304

However Im trying to make it work for me but the concepts while lucid seem to loose grip in practical practice.Hope your expansion of these ideas will illuminate the way further.

regards.

Thanks for your comments permully, I think Market Profile is a great addition to anyones toolkit and I use it a fair bit in my discretionary trading with good success.

Thanks for the thread links the're really good and that member - rabid really knows what he's talking about. At the end of the day he makes the point that although MP is a good tool it's not what you base your entire system around and I agree 100%.

I'll make sure I post on how I use MP in practice.

Take Care,

mim2005

Hi all,

I'm going to be taking a break from posting for awhile (a couple of weeks or so) but I'll leave you with this excellent post I found a little while ago.

I think it sum's up trading really well.

It's been written by a gentleman called Ziad Masri in response to a trader named Michael.

It's well worth the read and summarises nicely where I stand with my current thinking on what it takes to trade successfully.




Hi Michael,

I've been reading your blog for quite a while now but haven't commented yet. However, I feel I need to comment now.

If you don't mind I'm going to be very straight forward, and blunt even, but I hope you'll take it from a spirit of sincerity and genuine desire to help. It's going to be a long comment, so I'm going to break it up into 2 or 3 comments.

Here's the situation as I see it: For the last few months, and possibly much longer, you've just been spinning your wheels while thinking that you are getting somewhere. The reason for this is that you are going about learning how to trade in the wrong way, in my opinion. I say this because I've been trading much less than you, a little over 2 years now, and yet because of the way I went about learning and what I focused on, last year I netted $150k while nearly quintupling my account, without a single losing month, and while only risking a very small portion of my account on any single trade. Now there could be many reasons for the difference in performance, but I think one of the main reasons has to do with what you are focusing on and how you are going about the learning process.

To try to put it as succinctly as possible, in my view traders that are focusing all their attention on "set-ups" and finding out which combinations of indicators work are never going to become profitable. They are trying to follow the advice of trading books that say trading is simple and psychology is everything. So they search for set-ups that 'work', and that can take the guess work out of trading. They want to be "disciplined" and have simple rules that guide all their actions. But there's a few problems with this. Namely, while psychology is HUGE, it's not everything. And while trading is all about simple principles, actually having an edge is NOT simple. It's a myth that you can have a couple simple price or indicator set-ups and make money consistently if only you are disciplined. That's a load of crap. It keeps the dream alive for wannabe traders who never realize what it's truly about. Well let me tell you what it's truly about...

Trading is about being okay with ambiguity. It's about tolerating confusion. It's about sitting with discomfort and being at peace with it. It's about not having an exact script of when to trade or not to trade, or what's really a high odds trade, and being okay with that. It's about exceptions to the rules. It's about contradiction. It's about uncertainty.

And yet traders left and right want to make it simple. They want to reduce it to a few simple set-ups to trade with discipline. And yet the market is not simple. The market is all about uncertainty, and complexity, and ambiguity. Simple set-ups could never capture that, and they can never give you a true lasting edge.

So what's the solution? Is the problem in the simple set-ups themselves? No, it's in how they're being used. The bottom line is, every trader needs to learn to READ the markets. This means that simple rules will not do. There has to be a synthesis of different elements (whether they be price action, indicators, inter-market themes or whatever), and real-time interpretation must take place. It has to be all about CONTEXT. Once you can read the markets, and don't fool yourself it is a very complex process, then you can choose to employ "simple" set-ups to enter and exit. But the real work will be in interpreting the market to see when you should use which kind of set-up. Seeing a hammer or whatever near a support means nothing unless you've identified the broader picture and gotten a sense of the kind of tactics you should be using, and what the odds are for different scenarios unfolding.

Now I know you, and most traders do this to a certain extent, but your main focus is on the set-ups. It's not on reading the market from minute to minute, hour to hour, figuring out the odds of it doing this or doing that, adapting dynamically, and thinking of trade ideas from all your observation as the day unfolds. Rather, it's waiting for some simple set-up to pop up and then taking it.

Now is it easier emotionally to have clear set-ups to wait for and trade in this simple manner? Absolutely. But who said 'easy' would make you money. If I've learned anything, it's that the market rewards what is hard to do. It's hard to have ambiguity surrounding your market reads. It's hard being uncertain. It's hard dealing with competing and sometimes conflicting signs. And yet, this is what it's all about. You have to stop trying to avoid this by needing things to be clear cut. And is it hard to be disciplined when there's so much uncertainty about what is the right trade to make? Of course. But instead of trying to avoid the uncertainty by looking for simple set-ups, or some straight-forward method, train your mind to be able to deal with the uncertainty.

As for the learning process of how you go about doing this, it's all about being constantly engaged with the markets, trying to figure things out and learn from experience. For me, for instance, what I did was each and every day take notes in a journal all about market action and what I think it means, and how I should trade, and what is working and what's not. I didn't write a journal describing the trades I took, or what my emotions were during the day. It was all about market action. And it was all my perception and interpretation. Day after day, week after week, making mistakes, wrong calls, being clueless as to what was going on, not knowing how I should trade, not knowing if my views made sense or not, and yet I continued taking notes and learning. Then I would view charts and combinations of historical intraday charts, and I'd note certain behavior. For example, I'd study trend day after trend day and try to notice what they had in common and how I could have picked up on it in real time. Then I'd study range days. Then I'd study a price chart of the ES versus the Advance decline line and see what the relationship was across many different days. Then I'd do the same with the ES and TICK chart. And on and on. Over time, this gave me a feel for the markets, and a certain understanding of how certain days differ and many subtle signs and tells for each type of environment and context.

As for set-ups, I didn't use any predefined ones. I just formed trading ideas and then tried to get in at good trade locations. Even this, which is the art of execution, is quite complicated and not straight forward. I started realizing that in some environments it's best to wait for pullbacks, in others I need to get in at market or I'll be left in the dust. In some markets I can buy low and sell high, in other markets the opposite is in order. And so on.

I became consistently profitable in a timeframe of a few months by doing this. But of course before that I had read 30 or 40 books and so I had all the technical background. I had also worked a lot on my psychology and personal issues. But all of this was in conjunction with a method of learning and trading the markets that was mostly in opposition to what the general wisdom says about simple set-ups and exact rules.

Now of course you might say that everyone has their own style, some discretionary and some not. Absolutely. But even the purely mechanical traders are very adept at reading markets, and are aware of all of the complexity and ambiguity inherent in it. Their system might end up being simple, but it will come about through a very deep and complex understanding of markets. And usually this system will take the market environment (i.e. context) into account. It wont just be simple mindless set-ups.

In the end, all of what I am saying is meaningless unless you come to a personal realization. Take a look at your trading career thus far. Do you truly believe that if you just learn to focus and take all of your set-ups then your equity curve will reverse and you'll be a consistently profitable trader? Why would the world's top institutions spend millions and billions on R&D when a few simple set-ups could make them all of the money. This doesn't mean that to make money you need extremely complex mathematical models. Far from it. What it does mean is that you need extremely complex mental maps that take time and experience to develop, and that will never develop if you spend the whole trading day simply waiting for set-ups to materialize. That just won't cut it.

Right now your learning curve is stagnant because you're not truly studying the markets. Your day is wasted in waiting mode. It's not in observing and absorbing mode. Also, because you fear loss, you aren't willing to experiment. This means that you aren't making mistakes and failing regularly, which is what you need to do to learn quickly.

So to conclude, based on all of the above, my advice to you would be to stop trading and make a mental shift. Realize what you need to do to become successful, and it's definitely not staying on this endlessly unfruitful path being supported by the hope of future profits. You're just running in your place unless you change your focus and your learning method. And if you thought the journey was tough so far, you haven't seen anything yet. Get ready for uncertainty and ambiguity like you've never seen it before. But this shouldn't be scary. It should be exciting, because this is what trading is all about. This is why it's called an ART. And it truly becomes one when you change your focus and your learning process. Then everything, including success, becomes possible. And until then, it'll be a distant dream that keeps appearing to be so close and yet stays so far away.

So you need to re-align with a new thought system and then get on the simulator and trade. Take losses. Make mistakes. Be clueless. Don't be afraid of it. It's okay, that's the only way you'll progress. And trust me, progress you will.

Best of luck to you, and I wish you much success.

Ziad
Posted by E-Mini Player at 6/26/2009 02:49:00 PM
http://www.eminiplayer.com/2009/06/l...ul-trader.html


Take care,

mim2005

Fantastic thanks for sharing

Brilliant post mim2005. Thanks for sharing.

That post summarizes very well why, I a firm believer in automation, still find that mastering discretionary trading is a goal well worth pursuing. Automated trading is a lot less demanding than discretionary trading, but the later once mastered offers a lot more potential.

I think that for the vast majority of people it's easier to find some measure of consistent return through automation, because it's so heavily centered on objectivity. Basically, automation removes from trading all the guesswork and psychology stuff that would take years to refine. Going automated is like openly admitting that one doesn't know how to trade properly and/or is unable to cope psychologically with the reality of trading. I am perfectly OK with that. It's better to assume one knows nothing and make some money, than to assume one knows something and lose it all.

Long term, I would like very much to master discretionary trading, but for that to become a reality, I would need to master both myself and the market first, which seems like an impossible task in my case.

Enjoy your break,
d

Pretty generic advice: "indicators and chart patterns are useless, journal your thought process, put in screen time". A lot of words but in actuality there's not much substance.

Googled Zias Masri. He runs a website and offers a "professional training program" for $3,985. Go figure.

curious bout results

i wish Masri was here on forex factory so we can learn more and see more... learning from him on how to read the markets will then lead to us having an easier path of learning

Something went wrong. Masterz of dilluzziooonzz

I'll let mim2005 reply in his own time. Recently, we've been looking at other parts of our respective portfolios, while the EAs continue to tick over in the background. They have slipped backward somewhat, as they wait patiently for EU to trend, but are still up around 3-4% above the starting deposit.

This is still very much within the statistical results generated by the backtests, posted by mim2005 in post #1. The backtests occasionally showed several consecutive weeks of loss, before the next EU trend caused a new equity high.

The philosophy behind trend following systems is simple: when markets trend, they prosper; when they move sideways (which is often the case, especially with forex), they lose ground.