Extracted Thread (per thread starter's request)

Hi AltosTrader,

My broker is Armada Markets. Hope this info helps. Thanks for all the effort.


Best regards,
SSPrem

OK - Armada apparantly have two account types. One is with the .arm,M15 extension which is quite a string after the pair. The other account type has no extension. Neither account tyype will give me more than 14 days of data so I guess they have their servers down. However, the account with no extension displays the SSBO indicator without any problem

I am no expert on suffixes but that continuous string .arm,M15 may be enough to stop many chart tools and certainly appears to be stopping this one.

Change your account is about all I can say. I thought this had come up before but cant find reference to it

The question of twiddling with settings has passed through my mind quite a few times, though not recently at all as confidence in SSBO has grown over the months. Anyway, these are merely thoughts which I dont think I've shared thus far as the subject has never really troubled me.

We all agree that market conditions change and that particular settings probably lose their edge over time. Three things spring to mind if there is a serious deteriation of performance.

1. The number of CZ's - if market conditions change then there should be a noticable difference in the number of CZ's forming each week and thus in the stats, so lets imagine that the market conditions change in a way that price action spends more time consolidating around various levels, theoretically this would lead to more CZ's forming and your stats will show this. Alternatively (and the JPY crosses have shown this in recent months) price action spends less time consolidating leading to less CZ's and less trades.

I've considered plotting the number of cz's on a rolling period and as an average on a continuous basis. This would enable me to graph the results and instantly see if this number strays out of a comfort zone of some sort (plotting against the win or loss %'s). Now this wouldn't enable any predictive behaviour as such but what it would do is enable me to see over a long period of time if these were just part of a normal cycle or not. I could possibly try some behaviour predictions by overlaying a calender to see if there were particualr periods during the year in which these anomolies occur. It could possibly highlight the length of time (as an average say) that a 'refresh' of settings will be effective but then this might just reflect a curve fitting excercise.

2. The number of trades - I've mentioned before that I think this is a key statistic. At present my USDJPY M15 stats show that there have been 104 trade signals over 100 days with an 84% win ratio (remember I trade only the initial BO and no recovery trades). This to me is more significant as my GBPUSD M15 settings which win 82% of the time but with only 61 trades so although they give roughly the same win % I have more confidence of a winner on USDJPY because that level of success has been repeated 67% more times than on gbpusd. If the number of CZ's decreases so will the number of trade signals I get, for those of you utilizing recovery trades this might not be the case you would have to check. BUT if my win % remains the same then although the market conditions have changed, the system is still doing it's job. So it's a combination of number of trades and win % together which I would look at.

3. Consecutive wins/losses - You also mentioned this. I do keep an eye on the number of consecutive losses and how many times these occur and how often they repeat and what the average is over (ideally) a rolling 100 day period when I can be mithered to do so. This theoretically would alert me when an unusual pattern emerges e.g. suddenly theres 3 consecutive losses appear, has it happened before? how many times? if more than once how close together? what happens after - is it a mixture of wins & losses or is it often a long run of consecutive wins. To give you an idea, those 104 JPY trades I mentioned the maximum number of consecutive losses is 2 and it happened once FOR THESE SETTINGS, which is an important point. When I look back through my journal (which reminds me I havent updated it for ages) over the past 170 days it has only happened 3 times I think so I'm exceedingly happy with the settings on this pair. Having said this we can all see that for months now USDJPY has been pretty one directional.

Hi AltosTrader, yea that's definitly a little bug. The coder will know it immediately when he's made aware of it. These days there are more and more wierd extensions by brokers. Symbol() will handle any of the conventions but sometimes the programmer wants to StringConcatenate() for certain reasons and forgets to add for longer extensions. Just tell him and he'll take care of it unless they wish to leave it buggy in that instance.

Hi All

I watched this nice short CZ form on EURJPY, during the Asian session, and because it was only about 18 pips high I was expecting it to be a strong breakout, but whilst I'm still in the trade it doesn't seem to be going anyway. I'll watch it and see what happens.

Cheers

Paul

I spoke too soon! My EURJPY trade just hit my mental 31 pip TP :-) It went down a further ~ 2 pips and now seems to be retracing a little bit. I'm interested to see how far this one goes.

Paul

And it goes much further. I'am not in. Haven't found some usefull box values i can handle.
I think its no good idea to start SSBO with a consolidationzone beginning with the first candles of the week when there is also a gap...(Thats what i did :-( )

As an example my trades of USDCAD today:




Also USDCHF gave me just a nice BO.



At the moment i 'am short in EURUSD. It just missed my TP ~4 pips. Will see how it performes when the 'US Existing home Sales' news comes out in ~10 minutes. Hope it pushes USD a little bit to my TP. :-)

What was your plan before you entered the trade - stop - tp, fade, comments during the trade? Interest in seeing how far it goes is one thing - actually trading a plan is another. In time you will learn to trade your plan perfectly instead of trying to trade the market perfectly. You can accomplish trading your plan perfectly. You will never, ever, ever trade the market perfectly. Oh maybe you will be successful on a couple of trades in a row then bam mr market does what it does and you are wiped out and then some. Happens to every trader until they learn to trade the plan not the market.

My trade last night on the EurJpy - I am out and could care less what happens next or how much I left on the table or anything else - I took profit at the 00 instead of my tp on the indicator.

I took the eur/jpy trade, too. But got out way too early. I use hand-drawn SSBO's so I can learn a lesson

What is causing you to say you got out to early?

The exact question I was expecting

Am I getting that predictable?

More than the markets

I enjoy how you are throwing the ball back. You redirect people into questioning and sharing their process. Much better than posting charts with no details.

Hi SP

My plan was to let the trade hit TP.
My 'Interest in seeing how far it goes' was more about learning how this pair behaviours, which may be difficult with the current Yen fundamentals, but it's worth a try.
I mentioned that the CZ was pretty short, ~ 18 pips and so from my understanding these type of CZs are more likely to lead to big moves than taller CZs. However, on this occasion another CZ formed around the TP level and I'm awaiting a breakout. Following the completion of this next trade sequence I'm hoping to draw some tentative conclusions, but we will see.
I agree with you about the market, it goes where it goes.

Cheers

Paul

Just know that every conclusion you draw will be wrong in the future. A problem a lot of traders have is they draw a conclusion then expect the market to meet their conclusion and struggle for years waiting for their conclusion be verified. Food for thought.

That's right. There is one valid conclusion that is good today and will be good tomorrow: - The market will go up, down or sideways.
'A problem a lot of traders have is they draw a conclusion then expect the market to meet their conclusion', for this reason I try to keep some 'room', so that when this unexpected things happen it is not a bad outcome.

Cheers

Paul

EURJPY made a nice break south this morning....

Bah, I missed my favorite EJ as I was matching up VOB files but now in on GU, should do what it will do. I'll lay odds on that.

Some good news on JPY perhaps? GBPJPY also had a breakout for about 70 pips, didn't catch it though :-(