Hello graviton! how was the weekend? nice conversation yesterday with tymen in the chat room.
I wanted to ask you a question: as you already know i collected data of MAE from my trades last week, and i want to know how we can use the MAE to place better stop loss.
Thanks for the help Unrepipant. Iām sure this will help many 
Returned to trade after 2 weeks last week,and while didnt got a winning week,found that my entry timing still needs improvement - most times i miss the entry point and try to enter too late.
Got a 50/50 win/loss rate on 18 trades,but the winners never got really far,one went 25 pips in my direction(closed with +13),other went 35 pips(closed with +20).All other 7 reverted before 15 pips and closed between +1 and +5.All the 9 losses got closed between 5 and 8 pip loss each.
For the entire week,still lost 18 pips.
That seems a little better than the last time you posted. Without seeing the details of your trades I canāt make much comment. What entry method(s) are you using?
Graviton,
Hereās a quote from a forex news service referring to the movement of EUR/USD over the last 7-8 hours;ā¦
[I]āWith the market not quite up an running just yet, it gives dealers the perfect opportunity to try and trigger stops which is exactly what they are presently doing. There are reportedly a number of trailing stops now building below 1.2890 in the EUR/USD and local dealers are trying to trigger them. 1.2895 has been the low so far, down from the NY close at 1.2935ā[/I]
As you are an experienced trader, can you help me to understand
a) how much capital is required before these aforementioned ādealersā can move an entire market either up or down; and
b) unless these dealers already know where the stops are (via access to Reuters D2000-2 / EBS order books?) there will be no takers for their bids and prices will not move much; so
c) these dealers must be working for the top banks as few others would have access to the information and capital required?
Iāve been reading some academic papers about information asymmetry in the forex market and how ~10 large trading banks have access to 90% of the available information via private means before it is publicly available.
This sort of puts paid to the conspiracy theorists who say that brokers stop hunt. Iād guess that brokers couldnāt move a market even if they wanted to.
There is a book, Maximum Adverse Excursion by John Sweeney. It actually has some good useful info, but itās a very difficult read and I only agree with half of it. For most traders, it could lead them down more dead ends than itās worth. If itās read with a skeptical mind though, it has some good information. I canāt recommend it because itās so terribly over complicated, but there is valuable discussion devoted to using MAE to set stop losses, among lots of overly complex charts and tables and useless additional stuff. If you want to read it you can download it or buy a hard copy. I suppose you should put it on your reading list, just donāt let it run you down a bunch of useless blind allies and mess up your trading.
Most simply, you can use MAE to help determine how much stop you need to keep you in good trades. So separate out your winning trades and look at the MAEās for just those. You want a stop that will keep you in most of your good trades, while putting your capital at minimum risk on the bad ones. If you want to stay in most of your good trades, youāll need a stop that will allow you to stay in about 90% of them. A good group to evaluate is about 30 wins, but you can start with less. If you are going to have a stop that will not get hit in 90% of your winning trades, your stop should be above the MAE of 27 of 30 winning trades. Thatās a simple and useful application of MAE.
Also, MAE can be used as a measure of how well you are controlling risk by making good entries and avoiding the other reasons stops are hit. As your trading improves, your average MAE will decrease, since you will be avoiding red flagged news events and making better entries that go in your favor faster and such. I use MAE simply like this also.
But since I rarely let bad trades run all the way until they hit my stop, I can afford to keep my stop a little higher, knowing Iām going to exit early if I can and not expose my capital to the full risk of my stop if I can help it.
In the end, I think MAE is a good tool but it is best applied with a practical keep it simple approach. Itās no different than many books I read in that I have to make sure I donāt let it mess up a good trading system. I take what helps me and I leave the rest.
a) a lot of capital is required, but some traders like Goldman can easily pony up 50 million at 250:1 leverage and move the market for a little while if they wish. Stop hunting is done in thin markets, which is why many wonāt trade them. I didnāt trade the open today. Iāll look at it again tomorrow and decide.
b) I can guess where the stops are and yes, they have inside order flow information, so Iām sure they can.
c) Of course itās the big banks, Citi and Goldman and such. Itās not illegal.
The inside information they have gives less advantage with longer TFās. Thatās one reason itās silly to try to scalp short TFās against those guys. It should have no effect on good traders like us but itās something to be aware of. Thatās just my own humble opinion.
Trying to find reasons to trade and after a valid CBL entry go to the 5 or 15 min time frame and enter right away if price is going in the desired direction.With this method,what im getting the master is to catch the exact peak and enter in the wrong direction.Some revert right away,some go up a little,not enough to cover spread and some still go up 5-10 pips before reverting.
If the 5 min price is going in the wrong direction,i wait,and most of the times miss the good entry because it happens during the 15 minutes that im not looking after watching it do nothing for a hour.And if i try to enter,happens the same of the example above.
And only 2 times it moved more than 20 pips in my direction with me in the trade
There seems to be several problems with your trading. Iāll need lots more info about your trades to help. Start collecting the data on your trades in a spreadsheet as Gasinvile has done and posted here. We will need to look in great detail at one trade at a time. Post marked up charts showing the home chart entry youāve chosen, along with the higher level time frame chart with entry point marked, and your timing charts. This will take a lot of work. I donāt know an easier way to fix it.
Hi graviton,
I have a qns in my mind.
You always mention you would enter upon a break of a trendline into the direction of the main trend as well as a cbl entry.
From my understsanding if your home is the 1HR chart, you would look down into a lower TF and draw out the trendline in there.
I have encountered a valid cbl entry, however the trendline is not broken yet.
How would you go about it?
Thanks.
There are times i would enter without breaking the trendline, hoping it will eventually break.
Whatās your take on it?
Hello Graviton! Thank you for the answer 
Here i am againg trying to win this week. so far i havent made any trades, the market seems to be very quiet!
I totally agree!! 
I had a read of the introduction and the first few pages.
Being a maths and physics master myself, I can safely say that this work is full of fairly floss as far as a practical trader is concerned.
We do not need a load of waffle that leads to more waffle and philosophy. 
To give an example, I once saw an approach to solve traffic problems done by scientists.
They set out by developing a mathematical equation to determine traffic movement from a traffic light.
They got so bogged down by this philosophical garbage that their work never amounted to anything.
Meanwhile the traffic light solution was worked out using simple practical common sense.
A large flashing sign was put at each traffic light set.
This sign simply told you the speed to go at in order to get the next light in green.
The signs are set up at each traffic light set so that you get a straight run right thro all the traffic lights.
The congestion is removed!!
And where are the scientists?
Still messing around with their equation. 
Hi Graviton and all
thanks unrepipant for pdf,
everyones questions has been answerd greatly and contain very important information.
right now, I have 7 demo trades are runnung :
Symbol Operation Size Traded Last Pip/Point P/L
USD/JPY Buy 1,000 86.915 86.836 -7.9
USD/CHF Buy 1,000 1.0474 1.05279 53.9
GBP/USD Buy 1,000 1.52215 1.52391 17.6
GBP/JPY Buy 1,000 132.039 132.349 31.0
AUD/USD Buy 2,000 0.87121 0.87110 -1.1
GBP/CHF Buy 1,000 1.6021 1.6043 21.9
GBP/NZD Sell 1,000 2.15474 2.15421 5.3
I would like to ask how to hold the trade over night to make an exit if it would requared?
thanks
Thereās nothing wrong with studying the market all day Monday. I do it quite often. When I was a young buck I knew a very successful trader that never traded on Mondays. Heād come into his office early and spend the entire day studying and marking up charts and planning his trades for the rest of the week. I asked him why and he quickly fired off about a dozen reasons so fast Iād forgotten several before I got back to my desk to write them down. Some were like; to many amateurs trade on Mondays, it takes the market a full day to digest the weekend news, heād done a careful analysis of his Monday trading and it was the only losing day of the week for him over the long term, he was not at his peak performance after a weekend away from the markets, he needed to see all the opens to plan good trades, Mondays contain more whipsaws and extreme moves than other days and about a half dozen other reasons I couldnāt remember. I still trade 1/2 my normal position size on Mondays, if I trade at all.
Thanks for the advice Graviton. I am upto speed with tymens thread and still following it, hope to get upto speed with your thread soon.
thanks
Gerard
Lots of good trades, congrats!
Little losses more often than not turn into big losses overnight. Iād exit any trades with a small loss.
On the others, you will need to get two 4H candles or 8 1H candles in your favor while you sleep. Study the 4H and 1H charts carefully. Itās a judgement call as to whether you believe they will move in your favor overnight. If you are in the middle of a good 4H trend that you think will continue, you may choose to stay in overnight. If you are in a 1H trend that is losing momentum, best exit with your profits.
Donāt think a larger stop will get you through the night. If you think you need more than 2X ATR, you should take your profit now instead.
Reduce your risk by taking profit on the half of the trades you believe are the least likely to make it through the night. Youāll probably be wrong as often as right the first few times you try to do this, but keep at it, record your decisions and why you made them, graph up your success and track it carefully. Over time youāll get better at it.
First post here but i have been following the two threads for a while now with Graviton and Tymen. I have finally finished reading up on this thread and got about 50 pages left on the other to read. I have learned so much this far and hopefully now i can contribute to it.
Another thing i want to address is that i can not get that CBL alert indicator to work. It displays the headings but nothing else. I know someone previously mentioned this and was told to change the code e.g āEURUSDā to your brokerās format. But how do i find out which format they use? I have tried the 2 suggested but no luck.
Look at the tabs you use to flip between windows in MT4. The names there are your brokerās names. For most brokers, the names are case-sensitive.
think its working now thanks
had top put FXF on the end.
e.g. EURUSDFXF
I was just looking for something similar
Best Regards,
Matt Jones 