Hi Norm,
Proximal = the nearest month’s futures. These are (to all intents and purposes) the same as spot forex, except that they’re centrally traded and therefore “volume” and “order flow” are available.
The prevalence of all the HFT arbitrageurs in the market predicates that any difference between the nearest “future month’s” price and the spot price is going to be extremely brief (milliseconds) and very small, so it’s reliable enough, to be able to judge the buying pressure and selling pressure (which is of course exactly what “order flow” signifies).
You would access it through a data-feed linked to the CME, where the futures are traded.
I believe that if you’re not actively trading them, but want them only for “information”, it costs only about $5 per month, so it’s not a huge deal.
It may even be possible to get a free trial, for a while, to see if it’s helpful, and you could do that by opening a demo account with a futures broker (such as AMP, NinjaTrader Brokerage, or whatever).
I don’t know how long the free demo of futures data would be for (but it’s clearly not going to be “time-unlimited” like a demo spot forex account with Oanda or wherever, because providing the data for order-flow and volume does actually cost the broker [I]something[/I], even if it’s pretty nominal).
Mine, on the other hand, doesn’t [I][U]at all[/U][/I].
Success in trading competitions is dependent on [B]totally different[/B] parameters from those applying to successful retail/indpendent traders, Norm.
One is about [I]risk management over profit maximisation[/I], and the other is the [B]diametric opposite[/B].
Really - they’re not just “different approaches”: they’re totally opposed and [B]directly[/B] conflicting approaches.
This is why “competition winners” very often make [B]dreadful[/B] trade managers, and why there are so many “investment accidents” involving them.
I’ll say no more about Nial Fuller, since you seem to be such an enthusiast, and offer another example, instead, of the kind of thing that’s (sadly) all too typical … someone called Larry Williams, of whom you’ve perhaps heard, did exactly the same kind of thing: he won promotional trading contests with gains of around 400-500% and profits of nearly $1,000,000. Following this, some people (actually [I]many[/I] people!) didn’t quite appreciate the difference between the “high-risk, profit-maximisation success” of winning competitions and the “risk-management, safety success” of retail trading, and were foolhardy enough to invest on the strength of his competition success in his “managed fund”, and lost all their money (there was litigation about it - it’s a fairly well known story).
And again, in July 1988, the Larry Williams Financial Strategy Fund was launched, followed in March 1989 by the World Cup Championship Fund, managed by Larry Williams, Jake Bernstein and two others. The 1988 fund lost more than 50% of its clients’ equity in barely one year, as reported in the October 1989 issue of [I]Futures[/I] magazine. The 1989 fund also lost more than half of its original equity by May 1990. This surprised and disappointed the investors, of course: [B]they were people who had become impressed with him based on competition-success[/B], and they didn’t quite appreciate that competition success is absolutely [B][U]no[/U][/B] indication of anything other than being able to win competitions (often with large numbers of entries!). :23: :58:
What impresses some people is rather a [U]red flag[/U] to others … I’m “just saying” … think whatever you like about Nial Fuller, Norm, but for myself, it isn’t logical at all to be impressed with him as a [I][U]teacher[/U][/I] because he’s won a competition - the two things are unrelated! :8: