Institutional Equivalent Education?

@Samidy,
Ray asked was the 30 min chat pattern bullish or bearish. You said bearish based upon lower volume into the highs and I though bearish due to the Oil Inv numbers. Now perhaps you didn't mean bearish at the hard right edge, but both Ray and I thought that you did and Ray said he disagreed with you.

I recognise that what Ray said probably didn't influence the direction in which you traded the 'Sammy' trade, since I too trade it without using any prior bias. If the High Vol area is rejected, then I trade in the direction of the rejection.

Ray 'nostrodamus' de Medici

Today Ray shared the latest update in his series of Soya Beans charts showing predicted directions and turning points:

The latest emailed article from Boris Schlossberg appears to make sense - but does it really:

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Why do we REALLY Lose at Trading?
by Boris Schlossberg
“You miss 100% of shots you do not take”. That’s a famous Wayne Gretzky statement that many trading gurus like to quote. I’ve used it myself in past columns as way to motivate traders to take on risk.
There is just one problem. It’s probably the dumbest trading maxim you will hear.
You see, trading is not like hockey or almost every other human activity out there. It has negative costs attached to every failed action.
What’s the worst thing that happened when Wayne Gretzky missed a shot? Did it ricochet off the boards? Hit the glass? Ended up in a goalies glove? To Gretzky, the downside of missing a shot was minuscule. Now imagine if every time Gretzky missed a shot, every time Lebron hit the rim, every time Messi sent the ball wide of the net, the opposing team got a point.
That’s trading.
That is what makes trading so unique and challenging. We lose not because we can’t take being wrong, but because it’s truly painful when we are.
But here is where things get really interesting.
What the most common thing we do when someone punches us?
Punch back!
So the moment we lose on a trade, we instantly get into a brawl with the market. Our trading turns into “Slap Shot”, which was a great movie, but I think we would all agree is not a good way to live life.
We can deny this all we want. We can call it “trade adjustment”. We can call it “maintaining our thesis”. But in actuality it’s just a schoolyard fight and whether we are thirty or eighty we still look like idiots rolling around on the ground trying to subdue the market which will always be stronger and meaner and dirtier than we are.
In the end, we are just left with a black eye, a puffy lip and a sense of humiliation as the money in the account is gone.
So what can we do to prevent this?
I wish I had a magic answer -- but I don’t. There is no perfect way to overcome this problem, but there are two practical solutions to that go a long way to helping contain it.
Trade smaller
Trade less
In FX one of the absolute best ways to avoid a losing spiral is to trade with no leverage at all. That means for every $10,000 in your account your trade size should be 10,000 units or less. Although FX appears to be wild and crazy, the asset class is actually the least volatile major market in the world. It rarely moves more than 1% per day. What makes it so dangerous is the high leverage that can magnify those moves by a factor of 100 or more. Losing 100 pips on no lever trade doesn’t feel like a punch in the face, more like a slight pinch on your arm and you will be much less likely to lash out at the market and want to “punch it back”. You are always much cooler and calmer when losing large amounts of pips on small leverage rather than losing a small number of pips on large leverage -- and keeping your cool is half the battle.
The other half has taken me a very long time to realize. The basic fundamental rule of the market is -- the rarer the trade, the better the trade. It seems to so obvious in retrospect yet few people appreciate that fact.
Imagine the reverse. Great trades are common! If that were true we would all be billionaires by Tuesday. In fact, if you study the actions of great traders throughout history, guys like George Soros, John Maynard Keynes, and even Warren Buffett. They resemble nothing more than the hunting habits of a lion. Basically, they spend 90% of their time doing NOTHING. And only pounce when the conditions are ideal for a score.
As day traders in FX we can’t be that choosy, but we can still be selective. If you are trading with the trend, only buy higher lows, sell lower highs. If you are fading the trend, stay as close the daily ATR as possible. You’ll be amazed at how much more accurate you will be. Instead of making 10 trades per day, do just 2 and your overall pip score will likely increase.
None of this, of course, will make you an absolute winner. You still need a strategy, an edge, an execution structure and risk control rules. But all those things can be worked out. 99% of us never get the chance to find out if we can succeed because we lose it all in a stupid schoolyard skirmish with the market. Let’s do less of that.
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What do YOU THINK? Do you agree with his proposed solutions?
Do you consider John Maynard Keynes and Warren Buffett to be 2 of the greatest TRADERS in history?

Here is what I think, stating the most obvious glaring faults first:
1. John Maynard Keynes and Warren Buffett may have been speculators, but they were never Traders!

2. Yes, trade small, but unless you have a huge account, trading as rarely as Soros, Keynes or Buffett using no leverage will guarantee that any profits are so small as to be practically worthless after costs. In costs I include Hardware and Software, Internet, continuing Education, subscriptions, fees and commissions, plus your time (both continuing education time as well as time spent preparing for trades, waiting for trades and actually trading).

3. Over trading and Revenge Trading are serious problems (and I am sometimes guilty of them). But it is just plain dumb to cut down just cut down from 10 trades per day to 2 trades per day. Even though his advice on Trend Trading and Counter Trend Trading (Fading the Trend) makes sense, you need to have a way of scoring each potential trade before entry. Then take only the ones which meet you minimum criteria score! Boris' suggestions would work fine in hindsight, but the key point he is missing is that if Value is higher when price reaches the ATR ,then the institutions will continue the trade to the Long side and vice Versa.
Unless you are not really a day trader or only trade a very short time each day, then there will be more than 2 of these trades per day which meet your minimum criteria score. This is because at a day trader's timeframe there are usually 2 trend per market per day.

Helpful! Thanks for the wisdom.

I have been given permission to post this link to 'The 10 Institutional Trade Commandments':

It highlights some of the things Ray teaches and what it is that makes him different from over 99% of Educators in the retail space.

https://www.compassproptraders.com/blog/

There are other recordings in there, the one about the Squeeze trade is good, but somehow in the editing they lost the sound around the 43 minute mark and when it returned it was out of synch with what Ray was displaying. However he had covered the Squeeze type of trade by then.

I am amazed that they have allowed non-customers to see this video of Ray's new 'magic sauce'.
The indicator he shows is the Market Maker Delta Buckets shown as bars at the bottom of the chart and as linear regression bands on the price portion of the chart.

It was recorded yesterday a few minutes after the EIA Crude Oil Inventories release (which appeared to have been leaked since price started to move 1 min early).

The title is '06-14-18 Daily Focus Session- Market Makers Model' and it is in the CompassFx Blog :
https://www.compassproptraders.com/blog/ the same as in my previous post.

In the session Ray explains the business Model of Market Makers and shows ways to use their pricing to give us a hint when they get a big Institution wanting a good price on a large Order - we can see whether the Order is a Long or a Short.
He also shows a little about how to use a Liquidity Heatmap - and it isn't the way that the vendors of those products tell you.

It's working today (June 15), cuz yesterday (June 14) wasn't working. It's a nice teaser for the rest of the bulk information that Ray could provide...the rest depend on each individual.

Hello ian0foster thanks for helping
so what is the differnce between what ray teach in his course and his private website ?are they the same

3 new snippets posted in the link above.

hello ianfoster can yu tell what is the difference between mark coe course and ray

so i used mark coe strategy but i m really interest about ray ...what is the differnce between ray course and mark coe cause actually i m follow the mark coe course i want to learn more about ray course

Here is the latest email from Boris Sclossberg. This time I will place my comments in blue within the text because he is both right and wrong about so many things:

4 Simple Ways to Determine if Your Trading System is Truly Viable
by Boris Schlossberg
One of the best trading resources that I recently discovered is Andrew Swanscott’s podcast called Better System Trader. Even if you are not interested in systematic research and just want to trade discretionarily, the trading insights from the interviews are worth a listen.
One episode I found very valuable is an interview with Art Collins who is long time systematic trader in US stock and bond futures. Art wrote a book, called Beating the Financial Futures Markets which I have yet to read, but his analysis of what makes for a viable trading system really impressed me so I thought this week I would share his ideas with you.
-Why mention a book when he hasn't read it? Merely writing a book doesn't give an author credibility, only writing a good book does that!
Before all else, Art makes a point that I’ve heard over and over again from many different traders. The single most important aspect of the system is that it be in sync with your personality.
-This should be the most obvious thing about trading, when looking either for education or when looking at which type of trades and which markets to trade. Would anybody seriously suggest that somebody take up a sport or a career (rather than just a job) that they have absolutely no interest in?
If you are like me and like constant action then trading 100 times per day on a 1-minute chart is perfectly fine, as long as you adjust the system to the reality you’ve chosen. If you are like Kathy and think that such an approach is utterly ridiculous and prefer to make 2-3 well-chosen trades per day using the four-hour chart -- that fine too. (I would rather get a root canal without anesthesia, but to each is own.)
That being said, Art has four key metrics to judge a system.
One.
Does it make sense? Do you understand the underlying drivers? If you do not understand what the system is doing you will abandon it at the first sign of trouble. Generally, as I’ve noted many times before there are only two types of trading systems -- continuity and mean reversion. Systems will naturally underperform in adverse market regimes, but If you have a favorable market environment (trending) and your continuity system is not performing you need to quickly assess what’s wrong and to do that you need to know how the trades work.
-I humbly suggest that very few retail trading methods or system actually make sense more than half of the time and that the person trading them doesn't know which times that is, until after the trade! A 'continuity' method only makes sense when there is longer term Value in the direction of trend. Similarly a 'Mean Reversion' method only makes sense when when there is longer term Value in the opposite direction to the trend. If you don't know where the Longer Term Value lies, then you shouldn't be trading either of these methods because you are just gambling!

Two.
Don’t Optimize. Don’t Tweak. Don’t try to avoid the pain. Accept the drawdown because if you don’t it will only get worse. So if you are looking at a series of parameters make sure that if you chose a slightly different one the results will not be much different from all the other parameters. If they are that means your parameter is less than worthless because it only works on a particular set of data in the past.
-This only applies to systematic or automatic (EA) trading, and even then only to optimising the 'technicals'. One of the wonders of trading is that quite a small tweak to a net losing trader's money management/trade management system can transform their results- it did mine and also several other student of Ray that I know of!

Three.
At very minimum, the system must work on related markets. For Art that means that if the system is designed for S&P it must also work on Nasdaq and Russell. For us, in FX we need to make sure that the trade idea works on several related pairs, not just one. Earlier this week I had a system that looked very promising but when I analyzed the underlying data I realized that GBPUSD was responsible for 62% of the profit but it comprised just 16% of the trades. My new version was much better balanced with no pair accounting for more than 25% of the profit while comprising 16% of the portfolio. That’s the kind of distribution you want because that means you are capturing repeatable price behavior rather than one-off action.
-This is true to a certain extent. Certainly a trading method or system must be robust. However even within FX, not all pairs trade in the same way at the same time. So you must compare like with like. e.g. compare AUD with NZD but in the Asian Session only and excluding any Economic News events!

Four.
And this is perhaps the most important and overlooked aspect of system analysis. Make sure that the bulk of your profits does not come from a very narrow time interval because then it’s a function of luck rather than skill.
-This only applies if you don't have a specific reason for your market to move best at certain times!
I am primarily a News and Volume Cycle trader, hence all my big profits are made at such times even though I also trade at other times when Value is compelling!

Since I day trade around the clock with fixed stops and losses, I avoid that problem by creating as much uniformity in my trades as possible. But if you trade on longer time frames with variable profits and losses you should study your results very carefully to make sure that they are not skewed by one or two lucky big trades.

Lastly, Art says that one of the best ways to analyze the robustness of a system is to divide the total profit by maximum drawdown -- something I’ve intuitively done for years and prefer much more than the traditional Sharpe or Sortino ratio measures. But even here you need to be careful. If your system has massively large stops it could provide you with a very unrealistic picture of its robustness. For example one of the best traders in my room had a “return on account” (that’s what this ratio is called) of more than 10. She was up 22% on equity with a drawdown of only 2%. But that’s because the system was trading with massive negative skew (the risk-reward was 1:5) (Boris is quoting this the wrong way around - he means that her Stop Loss was 5 times bigger than her average gain on a winning trade. But R:R is meaningless to a value trader, since some trades have higher value score or win probability than others.) so the losses were rare and provided a false sense of security. Fortunately, she wasn’t fooled by the data and traded at very low leverage to prepare for any large losses that could come like an avalanche. Generally, the return on account of 2:1 or better is a sign that you are doing things well and a much better way to assess the risk of the strategy than the simple risk/reward ratio of any given trade.
-The fact is that every trader needs a suitable quantitative way of measuring their performance. But the performance measurement must also be meaningful for the trading method being used. For example R:R is meaningless to me since every single trade has its trade management parameters set based on the merits of that single trade. No 2 trades are the same. Also after a trade is taken value, order flow and price action will cause me to adjust my original Trade management parameters c.f. 'When the facts change, so do my opinions'.

I’ll be in Madrid next week at the annual Forex Day show, so no column next week, but come say hi if you are there, it would be great to meet everyone at the show.

Hi Endykone,
It is very difficult to answer this without insulting Mark Coe. The more so because Mark sat in with Ray for many weeks and so had plenty of chance to improve on his trading yet still clung firmly to the 1% that he already knew out of what Ray teaches.

At the very basic level, Mark teaches plain old S&R or Supply and Demand rather like Sam Sieden and countless others do.

Ray teaches the way that all of the following are applied to trading by the big Institutions:
1. Liquidity
2. Supply and Demand
3. Market or Volume Profile - forget Steidelmayer and Dalton, Ray teaches the parts that work in practice!
4. Institutional and Market Maker business models.
5. Macro Economics
6. Sentiment
7. Correlated Market analysis
8. Both long term and short term Value determination.
9. How institutional trade/money management can be applied to Retail sized accounts.
10. Spread and Calendar trading
11. Use of Options and Options data(even if you don't trade Options).
12. Making use of Liquidity Heatmaps.
13. Specifics for trading Forex,Gold, Oil, Equity Indices, Bonds, Soya Beans and Individual Equities.
Plus much much more.

Check out some of recordings here for a better flavour - there is just no comparison between Ray's course and that of any retail educator that I know of: https://www.compassproptraders.com/blog/

They have added 3 more recordings on Friday.

Hi Endykone,
Ray's website membership which includes his private Tweets is separate from but complementary to his training and his daily sessions in his Trading room.

The website part is all about education and the Tweets are a mixture of education and heads-up notifications (usually 5 to 12 hours in advance) of good trades that are about to occur around the Frankfurt, London or US Opens.

EDIT: It is important that I say that the Tweets about trades are not much use unless you know how to determine that Value has not changed (and so negated the trade). You also need to know How to trade in order to make the best use of them.

What a beautiful EIA Crude Oil Inventories. I didn't beat my all time record % profit on it, which was set back in 2015, but I did a lot better than for over a year, with a profit of +10.6% on the account.

If I hadn't had an internet glitch (fortunately while I was flat), then I might have even beaten my record. Still it gave a total of 5 swing opportunities.



The chart time of the release was 15:30 i.e. the chart shows London time.
The green bands are the High Volume areas from the last 2 Oil Inventories reports, the Cyan lines are the Levels of higher Liquidity from Bookmap as advised by Ray.
I only traded 3 of the swings an initial short from 66.0 the long (a late entry) from 65.5 to 65.95 and after a meal I got some of the last swing short from 65.85

Sam seems to have traded it better than me (as usual) he took his long from lower than me and held it to 6.26 which on his Futures charts was a $1.00 move up from the initial swing low (=$1,000 per contract).

Yes it is fast and scary, but I still don't understand why more people don't learn how to trade this from Ray (and Sam).
It is almost guaranteed good profits every week!

can yu tell what is the most difficult thing to understand ray course cause i m about to suscribe to the sharp edge so any advice from you will be very appreciate

Although I'm a news trader, I still don't have the nerve to trade pre-news like Ray does.
I made + 2.05% trading the G/U on the BOE decision on the release.

Had I followed Ray's suggestion I would have made much more because I would have been entering just above 1.31.
It shot up to 1.32 then hestitated for a while, eventually reaching 1.3227.

Here is his Tweet from just after midnight London time last night:

Hi Endykone,
What is most difficult or what is easiest will vary from trader to trader. For example I picked up his Over/Under -cooked news trading straight away and have used it ever since, but although about 6 other people from that early class attempted to do the same (and some even had better initial success than me), I don't know of any who are still trading it. I think a few are still doing the occasional pre-news but day of the news type trade, but as you see in the post above, it needs guts to put your money on the line before a big news event.

The thing that is most difficult isn't learning - it is forgetting and completely wiping from your memory practically everything (apart from Supply & Demand) that you have been taught before.

Advice:
1. If you can go through each class session twice (initially live if possible). The first time don't try to take many notes or screenshots, just the big points - so you are paying attention to what he is saying.
Then the 2nd time use the pause feature on the recording playback to take more detailed notes and to take screenshots (to mark up with notes later).
You must be well organized because Ray isn't teaching you a trading 'system', he is teaching how to trade like an institution - so it is like his teaching to new hires, but adapted so as only to use resources that retail traders can afford.

2. Don't try to trade while the course is on - because until you get to the end of it (probably 4 weeks or more) you won't have seen all you need to see. This is very hard advice to follow if you love to trade and if you don't love top trade then you shouldn't be signing up for the course!

3. Once you have completed the main 4 weeks or so you then need to start deciding A). Which trading style suits you best. B). Which Markets suit you best. C). Which resources you need to start your initial trading.

4. It is best if you sign-up as early as you can, so that you get a head-start either in the Live room or via the Daily Focus recordings. Most people underestimate how intensive the course is: approx 4 weeks of 4 days of 4hrs per day.

5. If you sign-up early, then join the Rays Students Self Help Group as soon as you have signed the Non-Disclosure Agreement. We can help with Trading question, with Resource and Platform questions, and even with some with Money Management and Psychology questions.

It is looking likely that the course will probably start on Monday 9th July.

Good Luck and I hope to see you in the room.

The latest email from Boris, with a recommendation to view a film (my comments in blue):

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Never Drink at a Vegas Table
by Boris Schlossberg
Molly’s Game is a movie that has nothing to do with the markets, but every trader should see it, for this one scene alone.
The movie centers around a life of brilliant Olympic skier, who after a career-ending injury, stumbles into the world of high stakes poker, running games for various celebrities and businessmen in LA and then NY. In this one scene in the movie, a very good poker player gets bluffed by the worst player at the table and completely loses his composure.
The poker term for it is “going on tilt”. He starts gambling wildly desperately trying to get his stack back.
It’s truly painful to watch as loses hundreds of thousands of dollars on one bad play after another. Although the scene has nothing do with the markets, it instantly resonated with me as I remembered all my own moments of going on tilt after the vagaries of the market got the better of me. Just one bad fill, a to-the-pip stop that then went on to hit take profit, or one just missed take profit that then went on to stop me out were often all that was needed to trigger a nasty bout of revenge trading that left me considerably worse off than I was before. Molly’s Game will be forever seared in my mind as a testament to the fact that no matter how well you know the game, the true enemy is not the market but your own psyche. Very true, once you have really learned how to trade, the only obstacle is yourself!
All throughout the scene, Molly is begging the poker player to walk away from the table, but of course, he refuses. This made me think about Vegas and the fact that they love to serve you free drinks on the casino floor. Why do you think they do that? Because they know that the longer you stay at the table the greater the chance that you will give back all your winnings and your starting bankroll as well.
The market is very much the same way. It’s not that most of us can’t win at trading, it’s that most of us can’t keep the winnings we make because we stay at the table too long.
For the past few weeks, I’ve been running a continuous trend EA desperately trying to make it work on a 24-hour basis. The setup was extremely sound but inevitably it gave back all of its winnings on the very last trade of the cycle as it sold the lows or bought the highs. Regardless of the safeguards in place, the EA could not apriori anticipate the change of market regime. Finally, I realized that no EA ever could. That’s why in the history of all EAs there has never been a continuous EA that has ever made money, because as I’ve noted a million times, all algos are simply divided into two types of strategy -- continuity and mean reversion and for an EA to make money continuously would be like saying that a person can sleep and be awake at the same time ( side disclosure -- when I was younger I used to sleep with my eyes open, which freaked out more than one of my camp bunkmates, but that is not the same thing).
Anyway as soon as I realized that the problem with my setup wasn’t the strategy, but the fact that I kept running it too long, I changed my tactics completely and made my EA single trade only, entering the market only when evidence of a new trend was appearing. In a sense I started trading like a good poker player, entering the game only when pot odds favored my cards while perfectly willing to sit out any hands that did not meet my criteria. Yes, that is the only correct use of an EA or Algo, though some of the ones the Banks run can deal with conditions for months at a time.
End result?
+99.1 pips in live trading on BOE Rate Announcement day in less than two hours of stress-free work. Wow, for once Boris did almost as good as Ray (see post above) who took a maximum of 122 pips on the up move (though he was distributing some immediately before the event and then just before 1.3200 before his final distribution at 1.3225, then he scalped some more after the top starting above 1.3250 as he advised by a Tweet while he was still distributing.

Endykone, it is not 'difficult' but it is very labor intensive. You have to do your work before you start trading every day.
A lot of traders have the wrong mindset. They think they can trade profitable just by jumping behind their screen(s) without preperation.
If you are willing to do that then you have to subscribe because this course will open your eyes how 'the big banks' trade(more or less). Then you are not 'trading in the shadow of the smart money' but WITH the smart money.