It wasn’t meant to be a preview. I forgot to attach the file :o
I should point out this works the same on all tf’s. They are all fractals. Not in the FX sense of the five bars but in nature. I kid you not… try putting up varing tf’s. They all obey the same rules of high/ low. 
If I feel lifes unfulfilling I’ll take a punt… lol. But the daily is my posion of choice for intra day and weekly for the longer trade. 
Apologise for interupting but thought Gravitons post was worthy of note. 
Hi Norwegian Blue,
Your indicator deserves really special attention. I was using it all day long and find that its work pretty well
I really like it. It is great founder of entries!
while I was using it, I come up with the idea. If you find it valuable then you may consider to add this features to the indicator. If you wont its ok too.
Say, we took short entry on H4 chart, this entry will remaing green until new
long CBL formd on lower H1 time frame. Would be good to hear alarm. So until new long position is formed (or almost form like few pips to cbl) we can continue to hold short trade.
what do you think?
thanks for indicator.
Hi R Carter,
Your charts are easy to read as remote control of space rocket :rolleyes:
Can I clarify your point please
while you are trading weekly chart do you simply hedge retracement which is itself a daily trend. right?
can you attach your chatrs with candles please
I didnt find any tunnels on your charts. one more thing what timeframe do you use to enter to dayly chart and weekly chart. thanks
Ahh… ok. My charts are set up exactly how I like them… bar chart. I trade high/ low across the high/ low bar or in your case candle. I find this works far better on the higher tf’s… I trade daily and weekly tf candle. The tunnel just refers to the a high/ low ma across multiple bars (candles).
I will start a thread in ‘Holy Grails’ over the weekend if you like so that we can chew the fat over how this works. I don’t want to throw off this thread. Let me know and I’ll come up with a title and post you here when its live.
This screenshot might make it a little easier to see the high/ low tunnels. Green and red high/low. (Might need to expand to 200%).
Thanks for the invitation, let me know when its live
I’ll answer the last question on position trades first. No two trades are identical, but I’ll give you a general framework for a position trade and you can adjust it to your needs as you gain experience.
A position trade entry is different from a trade I intend to exit within a few hours. A position trade is very much like a ball game. You have to track your percentages to improve your game. I’ll be happy to look over your percentages, but once you start to track them, I think you’ll see where you need to improve. I’ll break the trade into four parts for analysis, but if you need too, you can break it into as many pieces and do as many stats as you need.
In a position trade, I have to win the pips necessary for a large enough stop loss to stay in the trade. I’ll usually start out with a good CBL entry 1H trade with a tight stop of 20 to 30 pips. I do many hours of chart study and fundamental evaluation before I attempt a position trade. I enter when the lower TF’s are moving in the direction of my trade. Of course, I’ve already decided my pair and direction based on long term charts and fundamental information. My first goal is to decide if I’ve made a good entry. You can’t get ahead of yourself on this.
It’s easy to see if you have a good or bad entry. If price goes in my direction right after my entry, it’s a good entry, if it goes against me, it’s a bad entry. I’ll exit a bad entry if it goes 7 to 10 pips against me. A good entry proceeds to the next step. I’ll lose about 7 to 10 pips on a little less than half my entry attempts. I will go back into the trade one more time, if I’m sure I have another good entry, but about 75% of the time I just move to another pair. If I fail at two entries on the same pair, I’m done with that pair for the day and I move to another pair. A few bad entries is not a major worry. Those are small pips. Entries are easier when you look at them separate from the rest of the trade and work specifically to make better entries. Using Tymen’s method and watching lower TF’s as you are doing to pick the right moment for entry, you should be able to get 50% or more good entries with not too much effort. Track your entries as good or bad and calculate the percentages and calculate your average bad entry pip loss and you can see if this needs more work. It sounds to me like you have good entry numbers. But you need to track the numbers. That’s the first stage.
Once I have a good entry, I let the trade run. From this point on, [B]NEVER let a winner turn into a loser.[/B] If it turns back around quickly, I’ll exit with only a few pips in my pocket. I don’t count this as a bad entry, so I go back to looking for another good entry. That happens half the time. Track your percentages and average win at this stage, call it quick turnaround stage. You’ll have a % that makes a quick turnaround and you early exit, and the percent that continues on to +20 pips or more. For any profit over 20 pips, you can trail your stop up by half the total profit. You should never take a loss in the early turnaround stage. It sounds like you are doing fine up to here. That’s the second stage.
If this were a short day trade I would probably move my stop to BE at +30 and put a second lot on, but that’s too fast for a position trade.
For a position trade we must win enough pips to take a position. This is the third stage. When your first lot is 50 pips ahead, move your 1st lot stop to BE + 25 pips and trail your stop to take half of any additional profit after that. You’ll always take 1/2 your total profit from here on out. Half the time the trade will turn and you will stop out and half the time the first lot will continue to rise. Check your percentage and average stop out profit at this stage of setting your position. I think this is where your problem is, so this is the part you will need to break down and analyze very carefully. You may need to adjust the first lot to take it to +60 and put the stop on at BE +30 on a more volatile pair.
The higher you let the first lot run the more early exit profit you can take if it turns back down and you have to early exit, and the more pips you’ll have for the next stage. DON’T let all your profit slip away. Always take 1/2, since in the vast majority of cases, once 1/2 has slipped away, the other 1/2 will follow. Trail your stop in this stage to make sure you always capture half your profit. You’ll need to keep good records to optimize this part of the trade. This is just a simple method to establish your position. Once you keep records and analyze your results, you can optimize this portion.
If the profit increases, raise the stop on the lot by 1/2 the total increase, so if you get 10 pips increase in profit, move the stop up by 5 pip. You let this run until it stops out for a profit, or until you get the daily ATR for the pair, usually around 200 pips. 4 out of 5 times you’ll stop out for a nice profit. About 1 in 5 times you’ll make it to the daily ATR for that pair. This may take days or even a week or two to get to the daily ATR, so you have to be patient. Check your percentages and stop out profit at this third stage of winning enough pips to take a position.
Once you have a lot at the 1X daily ATR stop, you have a position trade. Put a second lot on with 0.5 ATR stop. Continue to increase stops 1/2 profit increase and when you get to 1.5 X ATR on the first lot and BE on the second, put a third lot on. Continue with the trail stops at 1/2 profit rule and if you get to 2 X ATR on the first lot, set a trailing stop to auto trail the first lot at 2X ATR, put your 4th lot on at ½ ATR. Continue putting on lots at ½ ATR, moving stops up to lock in ½ incremental profit, and setting trailing stops at 2X ATR. You’ll hit many small retracements. You exit before you give ever give back half your profit at any time. If you set up trendlines, you can take a big chunk of profit off on the break of a trend line, like the top three lots, but still never let the remaining profit drop more than ½ before exiting lots. In other words, once you take profit off and lock it up, it’s no longer considered as part of the trade. If the trade then returns to the main trend, as it will 4 out of 5 times, you can go back in again with lots put on originally at ½ ATR stop and increasing stops by ½ incremental profit and trailing stops once they get to 2X ATR. This is the fourth stage of managing the position trade.
Most people chicken out and bail on a quick retracement before they get to the point of making big pips. But if you can hang in there, you are often looking at a profit of hundreds and sometimes thousands of pips off a 10 pip original risk. Whether you make it that far or not depends first on your ability to hang in there through many short retracements, and secondly on the very long term weekly and monthly trends, and thirdly on the underlying fundamentals that are driving those trends. You’ll need to make some adjustments depending on the pair, but don’t bail too early and give up a good position trade. Once you get in one, you’ll be hooked on them.
Let me know if you have problems with any of this or any questions and we’ll work through it.
I usually try to enter position trades on several pairs a day and I’m only successful once every week or two. The rest of the time I exit with a very small loss or a slightly larger win. Let me know how this works for you and we’ll adjust from there.
Graviton, i am truly touched by the amount of effort that you have put in to teach me. I really am, that’s a whole lot of new information for me and and would need sometime to digest it all.
I’ll get back to you during the weekends when i have fully understand what you just said. Still thank you very much, and have a great weekend! 
You can use the method I described above to fartist to insure you always have a win from a good entry. You will still stop out often if you aren’t in a sustained trend, but you will always stop out for a profit on a good entry.
NB great job with the indicator and thank you for sharing it.
I have a question regarding what the indicator tells me or how to read it.
In this picture I understand the indicator shows a short CBL and how many pips away from the entrance line (red). However, what information is the 10 under Extrem. and the 11 under CBL tell me at at this point in the trade, or is the trade too far away from the CBL to be important?
Second question:
In this picture the indicator is showing Long entry while the pips are reporting the CBL short, is this an error or is the indicator resetting and starting to look at the new BB piercing? Also, is the 1 in Extrem indicating that it is using the 1 candle CBL and the 2 means the next bar is a valid entry?
Hi Norvegianblue,
i think when you add the new indy (after editing post) something is wrong with it.
i have the one downloaded 8h ago and it is working perfect(installed on my laptop) and the other one installed now on my PC is not working good.
maybe you can fix the problem, or put again the indy that was before modify.
thanks in advance.
Hi graviton you mentioned that "For a position trade we must win enough pips to take a position. This is the third stage. When your first lot is 50 pips ahead, move your 1st lot stop to BE + 25 pips and trail your stop to take half of any additional profit after that. You’ll always take 1/2 your total profit from here on out. Half the time the trade will turn and you will stop out and half the time the first lot will continue to rise. Check your percentage and average stop out profit at this stage of setting your position. I think this is where your problem is, so this is the part you will need to break down and analyze very carefully. You may need to adjust the first lot to take it to +60 and put the stop on at BE +30 on a more volatile pair. "
So am i right to assume that you would do this till you hit the daily ATR for your SL? So it means at this point you are still on 1 LOT, and are constantly adjusting the SL till it finally hits a daily ATR, which make take days or even weeks.
When you get that accomplished, then you would proceed onto add additional lot?
So mathematically if your daily atr is 200, your pips would be up 400 now? Cus 200 is half of 400.
And also, isit advisable to use this approach for swing trade? But we are looking at 4HR atr instead?
And also correct me if im wrong, as per your teaching a position trade we would look at the weekly chart and determine the trend. Best we setup channels, if there is any and look out if its touching the upper or lower part of it. We would draw trendlines to determine the retracements.
After which we would go to the daily charts and touch up the trendlines. Do we enter a trade only when PA is at the extreme end of the channels, meaning either the upper or lower portion?
Or would you define the trend, if its uptrend, you would go to the 1HR tf to find a valid entry and ride the trend up. Regardless of whether the PA on the weekly chart is at the extreme of the channel?
Thanks you.
Thanks for testing for me Hordane
In your first chart, I think the extreme should be 5.
I’ll see if I can work out what’s wrong.
OK, a total of 7 questions. I numbered them so I don’t have to copy/paste each.
- Yes you are correct. Even on a very strongly trending pair, it may take weeks to get to the daily ATR. You’ll find that on a good trade, you are entering the end of a retracement with a good CBL for a trade that returns to the main trend just at the opposite time that most retail traders are piling on to trade the retracement. That’s the way the biggest traders trade. The smaller traders try to get into the very tail end of the retracement trade and consistently lose.
Look at EURUSD for example. It’s been in a very strong down trend for about 6 months now as you can easily see from the weekly and monthly charts. Most small retail traders probably haven’t even looked at those longer term charts. The last good swing trade entry off the 4H chart was a “cut the extreme candle in half” entry out of a squeeze on May 28th. If you see it, post the chart so we can use it as an example.
If you drop down to the hourly chart you’ll see a perfect short CBL entry at that time. Please post that chart also if you want to discuss. But for a position trade, the last good cbl entry on the daily chart was April 16th.
Now, you couldn’t have known that was a perfect day to enter a position trade at the time, but you still could have entered, by taking all short 1H trades. If you look at the 4H chart, you’ll see there isn’t even a good CBL entry on April 16th. Post that chart if you want to discuss it.
But if you look at the 1H chart, you’ll see good 1H CBL entries on April 15th, a full day earlier than the trade showed up on the daily chart. Once again, I used a cut the extreme candle in half entry in a squeeze (the very best entry in my opinion) and entered at 1.3650 with a tight stop. Using that method of always taking every good 1H CBL in the direction I want to position trade, I was in the trade a full day before it would have been caught off the daily chart.
That is why I suggest entering position trades from the 1H chart. Now, there would have been dozens of 1H entries before this perfect one. The only way I know to get the perfect one is to take them all. The good news is you would have made hundreds or thousands of pips using my method on all of them until the perfect one came along for a position trade. The only difficulty is that to take them all, you’ll have to set an alarm clock for a prospective entry that will come about while you are sleeping. You can see it coming when the price starts to approach the upper BB on this trade. That really only happens once or twice a week or so if you are trading many pairs, and on longer trades once you are in them you won’t have to watch them while you sleep since you can set sell stops with stop losses and trailing stops to manage the trade while you sleep.
So there are three ways to enter this trade. Wait until the cbl on the daily chart and enter with a very large stop, enter with a good CBL on the 4 hr chart which will reduce the stop by about half, but miss some good entries, or lose a bit of sleep sometimes and enter on the 1H chart with a tight stop. Taking all the 1H entries is my preferred method. The method I gave you will automatically take you out with good profit on the many retracements that will come along before a good position trade entry, and automatically leave you in on the best position trade entries most of the time. You’ll need to make adjustments as you go along, but it’s close as is.
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Yes, as I laid it out, the second lot goes on with 1/2 daily ATR stop when the first lot has 1X ATR stop.
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Yes, that’s the math, but you might want to adjust this a little bit after you have some experience with it. I’m just giving you a frame work that will work most of the time. I almost never put a second lot on though before I have 300 pips profit on the first. You’ll need to carefully track your results and optimize from here. You can use DodgeV83’s EA off of Tymen’s thread if you want to turn years of testing and optimization into just a few weeks. I highly recommend it.
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Yes, the same approach works for a swing trade. The ATR of the 4H is about 1/2 to 2/3rds that of a daily chart position trade, so you can get your second lot on faster. You’ll be stopped out a little more often, but that’s nothing to cry over after you’ve made 1000 or more pips.
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Yes. I actually look at the monthly chart first, which gives a really quick view of trend over the past several months, but for a daily position trade, I require the weekly trend it be in the direction of my trade. It’s a plus if the monthly is also. I wouldn’t necessarily not take a trade if the monthly trend is in the opposite direction, but I’d want to know that something fundamental has changed with the pair to cause that divergence between the weekly and monthly trends.
The last time that happened with the EURUSD pair we were looking at was in November 2009 when the price reversed trend from up to down due to bad news out of Greece. The monthly chart was still in up trend for a month or two, but the weekly clearly broke it’s trend line and headed into a sustained down trend. A position trade entered on that trend change would have returned about 4000 pips on a single lot, and much more on multi-lot. The important part is to understand the fundamental reason for the trend change. There is plenty of time to study these long term trades, and never trade something you don’t understand.
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I used to do it that way, trying to guess where the best entry point is. Now I don’t bother with guessing. I just take all 1H valid CBL entries in the direction I want to position trade. I find that works much better. I may use a breakout of the channel though, to early exit with about half my lots, and exit more in anticipation of a possible long term trend change if it keeps going against me. I’ll re-enter on good 1H CBL’s though if price drops back into the channel, just like it was a new trade. It is a bit confusing at first, but you get used to it. And you have hours or even days to think over each move. Better to move slow and not overtrade these position trades.
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Yes, I now take all valid CBL 1H entries in the direction I want to position trade until a retracement trend line is formed. I stop taking entries when the price is in retracement and take off profit as appropriate. Then I wait until the retracement trend line is broken back in the direction of the main trend and start taking valid 1H CBL entries again, just as if I were starting a new trade. If I still have lots left over from the previous position trade that weren’t taken off for profit before the retracement trend line was broken back into the direction of the main trend, that’s OK, the trailing stop will eventually bring them all back together.
This has been a very useful discussion for many people I’m sure. Please keep good questions, comments, and of course charts with mark-ups on them coming (I love charts!). I want anyone who wishes to long term trend trade to be able to do it successfully and we’ll work on this until no one has any more good questions about it. This takes a lot of patience and careful thought, but this world of big pips is really a great place to live
Good comments and much appreciated. The central subject of this thread has now moved on to long term trend trading. I’ll be happy to discuss any issues with respect to trend trading, and all posts regarding trend trading are welcome, but issues concerning long term trend trading will get my attention 1st from here on out.
Starting position for me is on a day chart. I have two fast ma’s set to high/low. I trade just the daily candle (bar in my case) across the high/ low tunnel. If the tunnel is flat i.e. PA is ranging I’ll take trades either way. If the tunnel is at 2 or 5 o’clock I’ll trade only in its direction.
When pa hits the slower ma an alert sound will trigger. Thats where I start to pay attention. I wait until PA passes the slower indicator into what can be considered OB/OS. The faster indicator will track price exactly (its basically a regression line set to 2 which defaults to in effect price line but high/ low). When PA stops rising or falling it will leave the fast indicator at the highest high or lowest low. I enter the trade at mid point between the two indicators and trade back across the tunnel.
I trade 20 pairs so try and keep things as simple as possible. Trading under the daily just speeds things up and reduces the number of pips between the high/ low.
I also flip the charts through monthly and weekly and drop in a high/ low horizontal line so that when I drop back down to the daily I have potential monthly and weekly S/R points on the daily as well. For the longer trade I will enter as above but off the weekly chart.
Although I am simply trading a single candle on a higher tf… if you are looking to and trading the 1h it will apear as a trend.
I will attach a screenshot of my platfrom set up when it comes back on Sunday.
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I’m looking forward to seeing your charts. I know many are concerned that moving averages are lagging indicators, and of course they are, but that lag doesn’t seem to be as much of a problem when trading longer TF’s. I’m curious if you have had much problem with whipsaws? In my younger days as a MA trader, I had to install a significant dead band gap of about 1/2 ATR to prevent getting whipsawed to death in consolidating markets.
I’m not sure if this is commonly done as I haven’t seen it in any trading books. It is a strategy used in control systems theory to prevent a device, say an air conditioner from cycling on and off too fast. So if I enter a trade, it’s with 1/2 ATR Stop Loss and I don’t exit even if the MA’s reverse, unless it moves at least 1/2 ATR against me. Perhaps when I see your charts I’ll see how you deal with this. Sounds like you are doing fine on the longer time frame trends though
In reality of course most if not all indicators are pretty poor. Most newbs will have looked at if not tried the MA close cross and this will certainly attract more than its fair share of whipsaws.
My set up only includes one fast high/ low ma. A Regression line set to 2 (price line) so that I can have the chart as a bar chart and not a price line chart.
