I’ve opened a cTrader demo account, I fear it may only be
temporary, like the 14 day trial of DiNapoli, but it really all
has a very professional feel about it
14 days should be long enough to optimize everything,
but quite frankly, I’m not sure anything needs to be changed
Being far too miserly to pay the £9.95 for the DiaNapoli
I tried my hand at building from code. I think its useable,
hopefully, but not sure how much time I want to waste
for likely no real profit
Thsi is the link to the Befuddled thread…
Yes I’ve read that thread, I just forgot the title of it.
There are some good suggestions made, but the
issue of chop seems the main complaint, possibly
from newbies who want everything handed to them
on a silver platter, eager to point out the failings
of a candlefree approach
If I recall it is stated at the outset that you can’t avoid losers
Heiken Ashi and Renko are also attempts to avoid such
befuddlement
Often there is not too much befuddlement on candle
charts, and another option is to walk away if the
chart is anything less than clear cut
There are going to be losers whatever you do
EURGBP We had a fully qualifying EFS + DiN Short
setup that failed, pure and simple
We now have a strong Strategy #1 setup to go Long
Blunder!
I should have done likewise on GBPCAD
it was a perfect EFS Long setup turned perfect Strategy #1
Short setup.
I was away from my computer and I’m still long when I should
be short. Highly likely consequence is price will gap down
over weekend to the major Support shown and I will take
quite a big and unnecessary loss
It should have been a good win, and there is little
excuse for this careless mistake
but with all these situations, it should be noted that
its really Price Action with reference to M/W S/R
that is calling the shots
In other words, there are countless successful traders
who would be profiting from these pairs with no
indicators at all.
The problem with indicators is when you become
so mesmerized by them that they overshadow
what is really happening.
Again, KC’s suggestion to zoom right out, perhaps
on a higher time frame, is extremely good suggestion
to see the bigger picture
and not get too caught up in an indicator’s knee jerk
reaction.
CSW and Volatility Screener
Neither have really done me any favours lately.
It obviously makes sense to trade the strongest
overall against the weakest
but Boris and the omnipotence of Pound Sterling
so quickly became yesterday’s news
a good example of how fickle and changeable
the market is.
and I guess yesterday’s volatility may not be
tomorrows
I think both are useful, and of course Dennis
doesn’t blindly follow CSW, it may be a starting
point followed by careful analysis of Price Action
Only then does it have any real significance
Where we see Currency strength and volatility
we really need to know how long it will last
Which is almost as inane as asking how far
will the pair move?
The landscape can change very quickly, as we
see in the above examples
I’m already the world’s greatest trader in hindsight!
I was asked a few days ago why I dropped DiNapoli
after being given repeated advice about it
The reason is because I don’t trade DiNapoli
I was kindly given Wilder’s book on ADX, why have
I dropped ADX?
because I also don’t exclusively trade ADX
I am not anyone’s disciple for a very good reason
Losers need leaders. They simply don’t have the wherewithal
to make it on their own.
Want proof? just check any new system thread and watch the
newbies jump in, wishing and praying this might be their big
break
It never is. Nothing good ever comes from desperation
and one thing is for sure, the Big Shots who demonstrate
how their pet indicator almost never fails are doing no
one any favours.
Trading in real time is not that simple!
Please, someone tell me I’m wrong, I’d love to believe it
is that simple
Even backtested results are highly misleading, unless the
results are negative. Positive backtested results may have
limited relevance to real world, real time manual trading
I’m sorry to be raining on everyone’s parade, but as stated
before I have no wish to be right, I would rather be rich
I would dearly love to be proven wrong, and trade my pet indicator
for a 95% win rate. If that happens I will happily retract this post.
I wish I could be proven wrong in real time,
not in hindsight
I’m already the world’s greatest trader in hindsight!
but one of the worst in real time
I know sites that give away hundreds of profitable systems worth
thousands of dollars
Don’t waste your time!
Someone mentioned AIMS - the founder is a great coach and the
system is a viable Bill Williams strategy
Despite the positive reviews few succeed with it.
Thats true of all systems
Will I incorporate DiNapoli and ADX into my trading
arsenal. Absolutely! They are both brilliant indicators,
arguably two of the very best I have trialed
and KC put it well, when you hit upon those uncanny
correspondences you get such a buzz
and MY DiNapoli systems? and the ‘Greatest Exit
known to man?’
It was all spoof. Playing the egotist in mockery. Of course
I take no credit for anything
maybe one thing … consistent journal keeping … that
is far more valuable than any system/indicator
probably the best thing I learned from AIMS
along with T20, judge your success by each campaign
of 20 trades, not by individual trades. Smart psychology
A Balanced Approach
A balanced approach calculates the value of strong
indicator confluence
it caclulates the value of current Price Action
Where both score highly concurrently we should
have an ideal setup.
It may not happen often enough for us and we may
wait patiently for such a setup
Thats hard
and it gets worse when we see that our patience is
causing us to miss out on some very profitable trades,
So we go back to impatience and soon enough incur
a string of losers
So the answer must be to take a balanced approach.
The screenshot below demonstrates this
Revisiting AUDCAD and still incorporating the indicators
we’ve been discussing, we can consider each setup one by one
albeit in hindsight please note we are talking hindsight,
that is the point of this post
The basic premise here is we do check PA. then we look for
confliuence between DiNapoli cross with ADX exhaustion above
25, and ADX cross when above 25, and there must be a close
above/below SMA 5
Ideally we want all four indicators to line and concur with PA
That never happened once!
How often is that going to happen? If never, then patience is
hardly relevant here. Avoiding the snare of impatience may
be more pertinent.
Patiently never trading, will avoid ever losing, but is clearly
not the complete answer
Setup #1 I will score 8/10
No compelling PA otherwise it would score 10/10
but all four indicators lined up for a big 225 pip move down.
Setup #2 I will score 5/10
PA is suggesting a retracement and 3/4 indicators
concur for a nice 53 pip move up
Setup #3 I will score 7/10 because PA looks to want
to resume the trend and 3/4 indicators agree for a
163 pip win
Setup #4 I will also score 7/10 because of the nice
bullish Engulfing pattern suggesting another retracement
and 3/4 indicators were confluent. Despite that, we would
have incurred a -29 pip loss. It happens
Setup #5 I will only score 6/10 because we didn’t have
the compelling Engulfing pattern although still 3/4 indicators
lined up. Ironically, although this was a weaker score than
our losing setup #4, we would actually have won 18 pips
BTW are we noticing that trading with trend yielded 225 pips
and 163 pips, whereas retracements either lost or gave 53 and
18 pip wins. Surely something to be learnt there!
but +430 pips profit overall
Anyone can be a smug git when trading in hindsight. it is remarkably
easy.
So think about this, I’ve been using price close over MA5 for years,
cross of ADX for a long time, more recently been using Stochastics
and ADX exhaustion
so I would have been monitoring AUDCAD over this period and should
have at least come close to 430 pip profit.
Just look at my real life screenshot below and try not to weep.
I don’t know if I had any tiny wins, but I appear to have been
oblivious to all but one of those setups, and you guessed, that
was the one that lost! typical.
Point is, in real time I never saw those setups, and if I did,
I obviously didn’t think they were worth trading
Is anybody getting this? Anyone can be the winning big shot
in hindsight, it really is easy
But if I was a signal service, instead of alerting you to the
430 pips profit, just look below at what you would have got for
your subscription
and that is precisely the difference between Real time trading
and Hindsight Wannabees
and I’m insulting myself here as much as anyone else.
Seriously, I’m at a loss here
I’ve just gone over the chart below, checking the very far right
to approximate real time, and the setups are so obvious!
I can’t explain why I missed them, its almost uncanny, like
‘hidden in plain sight’
Why did my mind filter out what is now so blindingly obvious?
I hope no one is saying ‘You didn’t have DiNapoli’
George Soros could have made a house call. I still
wouldn’t have got it
Actually, even after being introduced to DiNapoli
I did spot and trade two such setups, but can anyone
explain why I missed these nine blindingly obvious setups?
How can I see two, but the other nine be ‘hidden in plain sight’?
so eleven screenshots, two in profit and nine BSS, means
‘Blind Spot Setup’
Depressing isn’t it
But here are the two I did spot
So have I seen the light, is this my road to Damascus?
I should have reached Damascus years ago, so I have misgivings,
but I am going to make a concerted effort to treat real time monitoring
just like backtesting in hindsight
it really shouldn’t be that different!
I’m now up and running with cTrader
It feels so much more professional than MT4
It doesn’t compare with choice of indicators but the
one or two indicators I still need I’ve recoded from MQ4
I was genuinely frustrated by my lack of technical ability
to code one indicator to respond to the data from another,
believing myself to be disadvantaged… I could possibly do that
now, it evidently isn’t difficult, according to the examples I’ve
looked at.
but I’ve just noted in a previous post that the issue wasn’t about
more accuracy but rather cosmetic preference
I get that, it can be quite important, but ironically I prefer the
indicator looking the way it does. It is purely personal
preference
I have a second cTrader Demo account with OctaFX with
unlimited expiry
At the moment I will use that for monitoring the charts
but actually trade my Micro MT4 in Polish zloty
When I am confident enough I will switch to live
trading on cTrader, either IC, Pepperstone or
OctaFX. Only Pepperstone are FCA regulated
but all three are sound. I already have a live
account with IC but Im bot impressed with their
non stop ultra positive paid reviews on FPA
I’m leaning to OctaFX at the moment but they
are very Islam oriented and I have a swap free
account whether I like it or not
I don’t know how excessive their fees will be
but it has a great feel about it
Regarding Befuddlement
I’ve always had problems getting Renko to work
on MT4
but I’m interested in entering on my usual Daily
template but monitor the trade on Renko
This is a highly cherry picked example but we see
the two glitches that might have caused panic on
D1, but how Renko would have let us calmly
stay in the trade unperturbed.
Renko isn’t a licence to print money, but with a strong
entry it might make for a calmer and more profitable trading
experience
Hey.
Yeh. Those Renko charts sure do look good don’t they. Believe it or not: I’d not even heard of them until only a month or two ago (when somebody else mentioned them somewhere around here). So never traded them. Have to admit and in just looking at the example you posted: if you just placed orders to stop and reverse above or below those swing high or swing low points or when you got a different color bar being formed then theoretically you’d be golden in the long run. And same with Heiken-Ashi to be honest. Exactly how it all pans out in the real world is possibly or probably something quite different. Don’t really have the answer because, as I say, not familiar with them. But yeh: they sure do look good. Guess my biggest problem with them would be that fact that their parameters can be changed and then we’re right back to the curve fitting scenario.
One thing I’ve been meaning to comment on though:
I’ve seen it mentioned more than once (right here) that ADX is great for plotting support and resistance. Either I’m reading that wrong and/or just not understanding. But I’ve never seen that. It’s fantastic at indicating pauses in a trend or turning points. But as for facilitating the plotting of support and resistance: never seen that. Nor is it even mentioned even as a by-product by Wilder. Something else that’s not really mentioned is the AMPLITUDE of the ADX line i.e. the higher the AMPLITUDE the stronger the reaction (in the book of course).
yes I’ve seen systems where there must be a postive
amplitube of ADX, over 20 or 30 etc, I have a line
drawn on my template to take that into account
The ADX peaks do correspond with S/R, another
useful trick is to select Target in ctrader that
displays the nearest significant S/R
However that isn’t necessarily the price
will be heading for or every ctrader user would be
fabulously wealthy
Curve Fitting. the above Renko is an excellent
example of that. it was just meant to highlight
how it could take the stress of chop out of
trading. I did pick the optimal period of
20 pips/bar to obtain that nice looking
smooth move down
Blinkered!
This post is overdue
I want to highlight GBPCHF
We had a decent DiNapoli Long setup and I went long
at one standard Lot.
Things seemed to be going very wrong unless you
just wanted a quick scalp
I would score this DiNapoli setup 9/10 because all four indicators
lined up and PA suggested to be a Bowl shape, bottoming out
of the move down that often precipitates a reversing move up
( and that might still happen, it ain’t over yet )
but I am looking at this chart through DiNapoli lens
Now when I return to Strategy #1, which is what I’m supposed
to be trading, we see a very different picture. Especially if
we put all thoughts of DiNapoli out of our minds and just
focus on on the trend following strategy and the bounces off
20 MA, corroborated with the very powerful Predator
Trend Strength indicators clearly indicating we go Short
Previously I showed several examples of how I had missed several
very obvious DiNapoli setups that went on to win… they had been
hidden in plain sight
Now I did catch this high scoring DiNapoli setup,
but missed the Blindingly obvious Strategy #1 setup!
To quote Marrillion ’ I’m losing on the swings, I’m losing on the
roundabouts’
Financial success was once simplistically defined as being
simply down to ‘the Lens through which we view the world’
thats a much deeper subject, but trading success and failure
I believe, may have much to do with the Lens through which
we view the charts
Not every patient sees the same thing in the psychologist’s
ink spot test
On cTrader you have a built in sentiment indicator. its very
neat and unobtrusive, but I sometimes am reminded of the
wealth warning ’ 79% of traders lose money with this provider’
When all my systems are screaming out Short, 90% are
apparently Long on the pair!
Clearly we are not all seeing things the same way.
I might have done the best thing. Gone in with a Scout
trade, and when that seemed to fail go in bigger
with a reversal trade.
but I well know how CHF can mess about, we can go
on for months like this.
The only two lessons I glean so far, is not to be blinkered
on any one system, even Wilder notes that no system
will work all the time
and the second lesson could easily be forgotten
A few posts back, trading DiNapoli, we could have
made 430 pips profit
but moves of 225 pips and 163 pips WITH TREND
and 18 pips and 50 pips on the retracements
What was that most famous adage in trading?
oh yes, its coming back to me now
’Let the Trend be your friend’
so, if you take a ‘with trend’ position that seems to fail,
is it worth trading the anticipated retracement which might
not be so profitable, and may simply not be worth the risk,
or just accept the loss and look for another ‘with trend’
opportunity
Sometimes, just because you seem to have got the direction
wrong the first time, it is assumed to be some kind of heads
up that the opposite direction will win…
when sometimes another fresh pair might be suggesting
a far more viable setup.
we can sometimes also get blinkered into revenge trading
without realizing it.
Scout trading is different, we’re not vengeful if the loss was
minor
Tricky Example
GBPAUD 10/10 scoring DiNapoli, very
strong Momentum bar up
but now looking like it might be reverting
to the Downtrend
but I need patience, I’m not sure yet… that is a
powerful Momentum bar.
its there for a reason. plus we have a Weekly Trendline
that backs up the DiNapoli D1 sat up
BUT there is still 160 pips DOWN to that Trendline
I really don’t like this ambiguity, this could go either way!
Plan of Action
What is the best possible option regarding the above GBPAUD?
again so blinkered I didn’t check CSW
Also I note the significant level of Support
If price closes below this level on H4 I will go Short x3 position size
even though price may likely bounce up off Weekly trendline
that won’t happen today
SMA 5 Trailing Stop
I can’t believe I’m actually trading the M15 charts
I used to do this with AIMS, trade the breakout of fractals on
M5 and just trail the Momentum bars.
I did extremely well with that strategy and this brings back
happy memories. Where I went wrong with AIMS is getting
so bewildered by their Elliott Wave mumbo jumbo. They
claim its not part of their system but 90% of the talk
seems to revolve around catching a nice Wave 5.
In six years of membership I never got it, never even
came close. nor did 99% of members. not negging here,
a lot of great coaching on a daily basis
but here is my SMA 15 cTrader template, and looking pretty
good at the moment
All positions closed in profit.
I finally went down to closing over SMA 5
and on GBPCHF it was very murky, closing
right on the line, but M3 on cTrader clinched
it
I went quite seriously into DD this month but made 19.84.
now that might seem a tenfold jump on May and June
but it isn’t really as Lot sizes had been massively increased
but hopefully I will end July also in profit
Gave it all back!
no I didn’t. I would have done once.
Even though there could be countless irresistible, compelling
setups, its good to know when to close down your platform
and literally put all thoughts of Forex Trading out of my mind
and just have a complete break, especially after days of
intense activity
