Hi all,My name is John Ukonu and I am newbie trader.I have really gone through babypips.com and quite appreciate the wealth of knowledge contained therein.I look forward to learning strategies from more experienced traders on how to discover a trending & ranging market in addition to the set of indicators used in each of them.
Thanks in anticipation.
John.
First of all, forget the indicators and look at the chart.
If you have higher highs/lows, its trending up.
If you have lower lows/highs, its trending down.
If highs/lows are somewhat equal, it’s ranging.
Price above a 200 ma is bullish sentiment and below is bearish sentiment.
What about the fundamentals? 
ppf, if you want learn something about fundis, then you could start with the bp section there, lol.
Do you know, it’s something you posted while back that really got my attention, it was about patterns, to be honest I didn’t really give you much respect at the time, but it was a key thing you referred to and that was that your bots have an element of recognizing shapes, I have used the old ‘Gartley/Butterly/etc’ pattern recognizer that is flying about, but recognizing patterns is much more complex than that, and patterns are a part of the ‘Holy Grail’.
So what I’m on about is a point of interest more than anything, which is that in ‘The Royal Institute Christmas Lecture’ in 2010 I think it was, they explained how difficult it is to program pattern recognition. I tried finding support/resistance areas with MQL, and I did get to a point but, zuzzy logic…
ppf, as long as some pips respect my account, that is enough already, lol.
Regarding pattern recognition, that’s just as simple as it can be. I don’t use fuzzy, though I could do that. I just look for specific setups or my bots do. It’s like with those pictograms at the airport. You do not see a woman/man, just a few lines and then you know where the bathroom is. So, in short it’s the same with my bots. They don’t need to look for all prices, just for a few components of the price patterns.
I do however not say you can do this with all setups and all patterns. Frankly, if I code, I think in solutions. So, as I see something with I might guess gives an edge in fx then I check that out with a bot already. I do not code indis or something like that, but straigt go into coding a bot and check it out. So, that’s why there is no border line between my analyzing and my coding. I think in code, if I analyze the markets. And that’s why I am fast in coding my bots. Usually in a day for the first version.
Regarding s/r, that’s probably rather easy to solve if you know where you have to look at. There are also indis out there already with trendline painting automagically. Or indis with horizontal s/r lines. You could use that as tool in your EAs …
I see, so you are younger than 32!
Lol, that depends on your number system. 
Are you on MT, or using VB or coding language?
I think it was VB trader I remember writing in VBStudio7 for, done loads, but from your comments you always seem to be a step ahead in effort, thought and understanding than I am, that’s why you must be at least 5 years younger than I am.
Anyway, hopefully this will give you a laugh, in the midst of the peak of my BuckCoding period, with many a complex stuff that I could come up with, I wrote a system that found 3 ticks increasing in the same amount in the same direction and then trade dozens of pips in that direction, it backtested profitably for about 10 years, then keeled over hand over fist, I wrote a couple more but then got disheartened, I hope I’ll be able to sort it out before I get Alzheimers!
And as I reminisce about the creative useless stuff I used to write, let me indulge myself in one I have mentioned before on BP
It was a funnymental, technical combination of multiple charts, colour coded of course, combined with an Elliot Wave principle.
Now if I remember right, I had red and pink spots for shorts, green and blue for longs, green and red would be the strongest signals receptively, these spots were then placed by my intuitive opinion of how the market reacted to the news of the time, once the news was announced and the corresponding decision made the relevant spot was made at the nearest point of the Elliot Wave ± the last high or low or something, gee, I tell you I had a red and green moving average too, and alerts for when I needed to go to the bog, it was useless, but it really did look nice, actually I think I had white and yellow too, for levels of undescisiveness.
LOL! I code since 30+ years as professional and did it in almost any language what you might or might not be aware of. So, coding is sort of a natural work to me. As I tried to explain, I can think in logics of code. My bots are all running in MT recently so that’s why I code my bots in mql. Beside of some stuff coded outside to watch my broker connections.
I do not say I am perfect in doing it, it’s just probably that I am experienced in coding and in thinking how to solve something while coding. If you look for prices from a visual human point of view it looks rather complex. If you look at it in a logics view like highest, lowest of a series of tuples then it’s not that complex anymore. In mql you even have max/min and that sort of methods to solve that. Frankly, my bots, I mean the basic parts, are not very big or complex. Just a couple of hundred lines of code.
That must be a younger picture of you then!
What picture? Oh, ha ha, LOL! Yea, that was the time when I was a movie star did you know that in my former live, lol.
Regarding Elliot Wave etc, I just know the basic stuff. The issue I have with trading and all that technics is that it is all only reliable til a specific point, but never 100%. So, I just look for statistics and if sort of a bot has risk below number xx and delivers profit above yy in a way with a pretty equity curve then over say a couple of xxx trades, then I go into further research.
Well, then your picture looks a little like you are working for the Vatican Bank in Rome or something like that. Right?
Anyone else, I’d say, Oh don’t bother with it, but when you use it like a tool it can work, I expect as you would switch the trend trading ones one at the right time, and the range traders at another time or maybe not, and I remember you mentioning you tweak them, and that is absolutely necessary, use the same bots now that you did 3 years ago and you probably couldn’t afford the shirt you have in the picture!
P.S. were you around when the Jesse Livermore ebook was being discussed, was Jesse Livermore a real trader or just figment in Wikipedia’s imagination, but the ticker tape story is interesting, it was the idea behind my 10 year profitable ‘bot’ I think.
remember in C++ equals equals equal’s equals!
I wonder how long it will take me to have as much money as them?
No, I just read something about Livermore in some books. At least unfortunately he didn’t find a nice end.
Well no, I do not tweak my bots. I check them to work over years and them are stable. I do not know if it will work in 10 years. I just think that markets in general never really change. Because the ppl never change. You have greed and fear and that all drives the prices. Sure, in fx there is also a lot of hedging activity, but even that is somewhat similar over the years. I also checked my bots over a couple of different data sets and them are as robust as you can imagine. And if you tweak some settings in a smaller range, even that doesn’t change the characteristics a lot. So, them are still profitable. I learned also a lot from those bots while backtesting. To see how markets change and not change. There are underlying waves, but even those waves repeat. So, for example I have a bot which is almost quiet, ie. makes no trades in one period and then it makes more trades in another.
The key to success with bots is the same as with discretionary trading: Risk control. If you can manage to survive, then it’s just a matter of time until the profits grow an account. Same with bots. If they manage to use a good risk control. then even the more meager terms don’t matter.
Just a few months. Look here:
http://forums.babypips.com/show-me-money-daytrading/39517-200-200000-7-months.html#post265234
Purplepatchforex and bucks coder…
I think the newbie who posted the question left the building after reading what both you guys were talking about
Papyjay if you still looking for someplace to start I think I might have a simple way of doing things.
Refer to 301 Moved Permanently
Happy Pipping.