Welcome to TNSOL Town

A small fire could be seen burning in the distance of an abandoned railroad property in backwoods Beaver County early this morning. For the dozen of us census workers who spent the early morning hours today attempting to count the homeless population in our zone, this was exactly what we were looking for.

We trekked down a long and winding gravel road that led to the secluded camp site unsure of what we might find. The glow of the fire brightened the closer we inched with flashlights trained on the area. But when we arrived at the fire, there was no one there, just a red car with a legally registered Pennsylvania plate and other indications that someone in another car left hurriedly minutes before. We had been fooled. Instead of enumerating someone, we likely had been stalking a couple of teenagers drinking beer.

Beginning at 12 a.m. today, census workers fanned out across the country to canvass Targeted Non-sheltered Outdoor Locations, or TNSOL, searching for homeless people who would be otherwise omitted from the decennial count. Our group searched six places in our region that previous canvassers indicated might be where the homeless population stays. Wearing reflective vests and holding flashlights and clipboards, we searched local parks, underneath bridges and in densely wooded areas, but found no one during the three-hour event. The frigid temperatures likely sent the people we were looking for into shelters for the nights.

Although it was unsatisfying, it still felt important that we made the effort to count those who are the most neglected in our society. The U.S. Census Bureau's effort to count these people across the country should give a more accurate representation of who we are as a nation. And it shows that the 2010 Census is about more than just a paper form to be filled out and mailed back.

Achieving a High Win Rate

Every time I put a trade on, I take on risk - a risk of a loss of my money. Sounds obvious. The more trades, the more risk.

But what isn't obvious is that new traders take on this risk without a proper analysis of the consequences. Knowing the risk of my trading plan is a fundamental requirement to achieving CP (consistent profitability) as other wise you are only "hoping" you will be profitable.

How do you find out this magic number? Through SIM trading if you're smart, or by live trial and error and losing money if that's the way you want to go - certainly, initially, there will be a difference between your SIM and live trading.

This aspect of trading is one of the few elements that you can control. What percentage win rate do I require from a setup? You control this by your requirement in the "picture" you want to see before you put on that trade. That snapshot that determines GO or NO GO at the close of the bar. You control that. A specific and consistent application of your requirements will make you trade less and win more. The more particular you are, the higher the win rate.

To tune your level of earnings you have the magic of position sizing. Range Bars enable me to position size each trade equally - something that I would need to do on a trade by trade basis if I was using time or tick bars as then my stop loss would need to be more variable. So I become more particular about my setups but trade larger to earn enough.

If your win rate is not what you want, it is either because you have not been specific enough in your trading plan or because you need to tighten your requirements in your setups.

The Euro FX chart below shows how easy it can be. It doesn't get much clearer than this.

C

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Why I Trade and Nick Update

There is only one reason I trade - for the MONEY. 

If I could, I'd go live on the Barrier Reef in Australia, go diving every day and eat coral trout, and just get them to send me the cheques (checks). But reality rules, and that's just not going to happen. (Mrs. EL says that I would live that for about two weeks, like every other time I tried, and then start complaining that I had too much time on my hands or I didn't have enough "brain" work).

So I'll keep working till I die, slowing down a bit as I enter old farthood and trading longer term through my option program. 

But for the foreseeable next 5 years it's the ES, Euro, ET and Bund for me. All liquid markets. I'll use the FloBot to take the load off a bit.

Traders make it hard for themselves. I just try and keep it simple, the simplier the better. My trading plan is sound and I don't care about losing trades. I understand my trading profile and what to expect. I know when I have losses due to lost focus and I try not to trade when my head is not in the game. I would rather lose a day of trading than lose money due to my lack of focus.

This aspect of isolation and focus is very important for me. I am continually fighting to keep it. I sometimes get tempted to look at something on the web, start reading that new book or something else not directly related to the trade. If I do, I'll miss a trade or miss an exit. But that's my trading disposition, yours might be different, but it pays in spades to find out what "yours" is.  The better you know yourself the better trader you will become.

Nick will be starting treatment for his Hodgkins this week. He is in very good hands - a team that specializes in Hodgkins. We spent the last two weeks doing tests and scans of every kind so the team know what they are up against. He has a 6 month treatment schedule ahead of him and I won't be posting about him again until I can say that Nick has been cured which is what the doctors are aiming at. Thanks again everybody who is thinking of him and has wished him well.

Trades from Monday 29th March in the Euro FX future show that sometimes a late entry is not a disadvantage. Also, using range bars, the methodology is quite forgiving and allows you to exit potential losing trades at a small profit or break even.

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Working for Free - Part 2

By Joe Pontillo
BLB Guest Blogger

When I got to L.A., I had no immediate prospects in the entertainment business, and had no idea how I was supposed to get that started. I began working a couple of part time jobs - at a grocery store (Ralphs, as featured in The Big Lebowski) and a video store (remember when you used to have to go to a store to rent a movie?). I'd had no L.A. or New York internships during my time at film school, so I didn't know anyone and didn't have any professional experience. And when that's the situation, there's really only one way to get your start. You work for free.

My aunt, who lived in Ohio, informed me that a neighborhood friend of hers had a son who was producing music videos out in L.A. She offered to put me in touch with him and see if he could offer me any advice or opportunities. It just so happened the company he worked for was bringing in interns at the exact moment I contacted him, and he offered to pass my resume along.

So that's how it happens. You you become an intern or, simply, an unpaid production assistant. "Un-work," as I refer to it. This accomplishes two of the most important things you need to start your career in entertainment - it gets you experience, which is far more valuable than any college degree; and it helps you make friends and acquaintances, which is how you're going to find your way into future jobs. Since entertainment jobs are essentially all freelance, you live by your connections. These are the people who will inform you about job openings on their shows and will get your resumes to the right people (along with the ever-important implied recommendation).

How do you keep a roof over your head and food on your cheap Ikea table while you're working for free? It's surprisingly manageable, even in the high-cost-of-living city of L.A. Obviously, you're not living extravagantly. But as long as the bosses at your part time jobs are somewhat cooperative, you can usually work out a schedule where you can earn enough to get by, have plenty of face time at your unpaid entertainment job, and even have enough left over to go out to the occasional movie.

How do these multi-million or billion-dollar companies justify using free labor when they seem to have so much money to kick around? Well, I can't honestly say it's justified. There are a lot of people with padded pockets walking amongst the zero-dollar interns in any given office, and it seems like there should be a way for them to remain rich while still tossing a few bucks to the underlings.

But ask any line producer on any show at any time and they'll tell you the budget is beyond stretched. And they're not lying; they can only work with what they're given.

It may suck to have to work for free but, in a way, it's the greatest gift a newcomer could ask for. It makes the game so easy to play. People who are stressed out about money love to get things for free, and you're in a position to underbid anyone. It's an investment in yourself; you'll gain experience and contacts that will pay dividends later

I worked around the office of the music video company for a couple months, and was invited to be to an on-set production assistant on a couple of their music videos and commercials. With that experience on my resume, I was able to convince "The Amazing Race" to hire me for a low-end position. From there, I worked my way up to higher positions on a variety of shows. It's amounted to some six years of employment. And that, my friends, is what we call a career.

Recently, however, I've been looking for a change. I'd worked those six years mostly in post production on unscripted TV shows. When I finally took a moment to give my life some cold, hard analysis, I remembered that I'd never really meant to pursue post production, and had never been all that passionate about unscripted shows. It was time for a change. And, as luck would have it, a friend who works in animation informed me that they were accepting interns at her company.

It's hard to press the reset button at age 29. But I'm not getting any younger; I can do it now, or wait until I'm even older and more ingrained in what I've been doing. So I took the chance. For almost a year now, I've been putting in several days a week at the animation company. It's been great to try something new. I have plenty of anxiety about whether or not they'll be able to hire me, especially in this economy. But at least this time around, I have one thing that I didn't have before - the knowledge that working for free is a great strategy that pays off.

So what can I say? It's like the lady said: a great way to get your start is to offer to work for free.

Accept it. Embrace it. Don't resist it. It will serve you well.

Joe Pontillo previously worked in post production on unscripted television shows. He currently interns at Shadow Animation and writes scripts. He resides in Los Angeles and blogs at www.yourdailyjoe.com

Working for Free - Part 1

By Joe Pontillo
BLB Guest Blogger

When you enroll in film school, people start to take you a little more seriously as an aspiring filmmaker. You still face a certain amount of skepticism from a great many people, but at least your goals -- and your intentions to achieve them -- come off as a little more authentic. People have a better understanding of how to relate to you. What was once perceived as a flight of fancy now seems more practical and attainable and, most importantly, comprehensible. When they see a "making of" special, or a magazine interview with Quentin Tarantino, they think of you.

In 2000, while I was right in the middle of film school, a friend of the family passed an article my way. A soon-to-be-released movie had amongst its producers a native of my hometown of Erie, Pa., so the local newspaper did an interview with her. The movie in question was Dungeons & Dragons. Yes, that Dungeons & Dragons -- the rather regrettable adaptation of the role-playing game starring Jeremy Irons and Thora Birch. But, quality of the movie aside, it was interesting to know that someone from my hometown was a producer, and that it was really possible for a lowly Pennsylvanian to "make it in Hollywood."

I've long since forgotten the name of the producer, and the article does not seem to be archived online. But as I recall, the questions focused on what it's like to go from a small Pennsylvania town all the way to big, bad Los Angeles, and then how one actually manages to become a producer on a movie. In the course of answering one of the questions, the producer said something that stood out from everything else in the entire article. Something that would haunt my remaining college years. Something that would stoke my anxieties about taking the dive and moving to Los Angeles. She said that when one is getting a start in the entertainment industry, a great strategy is to offer to work for free.

I couldn't believe what I was reading. Work for free? But how? How do you manage to pay your rent, or buy food, or, hell, go out to see a movie once in a while? Because isn't that why you wanted to get into this business in the first place... because you love movies? I couldn't imagine working for free in Pennsylvania, so how was I supposed to work for free in California, where the cost of living, as I understood it, was far higher?

And then I started to get indignant. Why should someone have to work for free on a movie? When it comes to money and Hollywood, all you ever hear about are these $80 million budgets and these $200 million box office returns. Are you telling me there's no room in there to toss a newbie a few hundred dollars a week to help them get by?"

"Not me," I assured myself. "Maybe this woman worked for free to get her start, but that's not what I'm gonna do. I know I have to start low on the ladder. Of course! But I'll make sure I'm earning at least a little bit of money. I have to!"

And then I worked for free.

Click here for Part 2...

Joe Pontillo previously worked in post production on unscripted television shows. He currently interns at Shadow Animation and writes scripts. He resides in Los Angeles and blogs at www.yourdailyjoe.com

Roll Up, Roll Up, Every Trade is a Winner

Trading is a funny business. You can take two setups that look the same yet have two different results. By the time I have written my trading plan, I have a number of high probability setups that I trade with a high win rate. When they don't work, all that has happened is that one or more traders with larger size has taken an opposite position. That's all that has happened. Nothing has broken. The setup was never 100% nor could it be.

Once you have a high win rate setup, it's very important not to fiddle with it. You have done your job of designing it, now trade it. Losing trade? Big deal. As soon as you start second guessing or "fine tuning" a good setup, you are on a very slippery slope to losses.

And why try and avoid losing trades if you have kept to your trading plan? You know you can expect, say, a 68% win rate, average win more than 1.5 times average loss etc., etc. That's enough to get you into the big league of earners if you can stand increasing your size. That's what you should focus on. Once you have a solid trade plan and have achieved CP on small size, the next step is gradually adding size as your capital grows, not to try and achieve 100% winning trades which is impossible.

The chart below for the ES on Friday shows 2 trades. The first one is straightforward. The second one is a deliberate "late" entry. I almost entered 7 bars before but it looked like it would bounce. The bar where I entered was one bar late. I couldn't enter on the bar before because I had rejected the trade 7 bars before and the 2 entries were very similar. In this case the entry 1 bar later gave certainty at the price of the late entry.

Click to enlarge

Taming the DAX

I haven't traded the DAX (Eurex stock index) for about 4 years. It can be a very volatile market and you can make a small fortune - out of a large one - if you are not very structured in your trading plan. On the other hand, the DAX provides great opportunities, so if you have the deep pockets and capital for this market, it may be worth a look. But ONLY after extensive SIM and CP in SIM. This market is pushed around by the big money and "they" routinely fake out many traders.

Having looked at charts for a few days and running the FloBot, I am looking forward to trading this market again as it provides more volatility on days when the other markets don't.

 Click to enlarge

A New Suit

One of the rights of manhood that I went through, was as soon as I had a bit of money from working, I wanted to go to my father's tailor and have a suit made to measure.

It's interesting how the process works.

The tailor was a friend of my father, another immigrant, who had been a professional of some sort - lawyer, accountant - in his previous life, but his profession was not portable to Australia. He noticed that other immigrants were starting to make more money and could pay for high quality made to measure suits. So he hired a real tailor - the guy who actually cut the cloth and sewed the suit - opened a small work room and started a bespoke suit business.

There was one problem. The tailor to be had seen what a suit looked like finished - everyone has, and he had seen a bolt of cloth. Problem was that he didn't know the process that turned the bolt of cloth into a well fitting suit.

Needless to say, this guy went on to a 50 year career making bespoke suits for local businessmen as well as Sydney's rich and famous. He reverse engineered what had to be done by pulling apart completed suits and figuring out what he needed to do, so his working tailor at the sewing machine could do his part,

Here is yesterday's ( Wednesday 24th March) ES chart with FloBot trades. It was a normal day where scaling out really paid off as there was no follow through. The all in and all out traders did even better. These normal low range days don't give you much but you can do better as a discretionary trader. The day needs to be traded with outside in setups. Its harder to identify these trades early but you can look at what happens at support and resistance areas. If you see a turn in the order flow at these areas with over bought or oversold condition (depending on a potential LONG or SHORT), with a switch in momentum through the CCIs, you have a trade. Once the day has graduated to 3 rows of TPOs and perhaps range extension, you have more information and can trade  into the direction of the range extension but from the other side of the VA. These are high percentage trades. Once the Market Profile has developed more you can trade in both directions but being aware of the extra risk in trading against the range extension direction.

Census 101

LEETSDALE, Pa. - I am now officially a public servant. At 8:39 a.m. today, I raised my right hand inside the borough building here along the Ohio River and pledged to participate faithfully and honestly in the federal government's census count.

The first day of census training was simple, although I must have signed and filed a couple dozens registration forms during the eight-hour shift. Those typical bureaucratic forms ranged from direct deposit information to confidentiality agreements. And it felt great to know I will be earning my government paycheck by working rather than raking in taxpayer money due to lack of employment.

The room was filled with 25 people of various backgrounds, ages and professions (or lack thereof). Most said they were retirees, although a few of us in there mentioned we were without a job. This position will supplement our income and give us a much-needed feeling of being productive.

The initial phase of the job for this crew will last for about four weeks and focus on counting people living in group quarters. That includes nursing homes, soup kitchens, homeless shelters and prisons. Fortunately, I don't know of any prisons in the western Allegheny County zone where I'll be working. We continue to train Thursday and Friday before the crew leaders cuts us loose next week.

I'm looking forward to getting back into the workforce.

The Short Cut to Success

There is a thread on TradersLaboratory that I contributed to. The OP suggested I was keeping what I did secret and that I should "reveal all my secrets".

During the last 6 months or so since this blog began, I believe I have set out a short cut to success in this business. Following this roadmap, Kiki became CP (consistently profitable) in less than 6 months, albeit with personal mentoring from me, but still using the roadmap I set out in the blog.

I wanted to paste my answer to that TL post below in case you don't read TradersLab.

Guys, you are looking for a pre-packaged mechanical formula for discretionary trading. That is a contradiction. "Discretionary" means "discretionary".

To me a setup is like a picture. When the picture is "right" I enter the trade. Sometimes I draw on where the support is, sometimes momentum is more important. Order flow is always important but sometimes its the VB I want to see right and sometimes the CVD must be trending. It always depends on the circumstances.

The only way to "get it" is to do what I did: look at what happened just before a good trade triggered. That's why I push SIM trading so hard. Until you recognise FOR YOURSELF what the difference is between a good setup and no setup, you are doomed to lose. You want to run before you can walk. There is no substitute for the work to train yourself to see.

Now as far as the FloBot is concerned, that is not discretionary trading. Its mechanical trading, which is something different. The rules for FloBot are not discretionary. They are specific but general. The performance from FloBot will probably not be as good as a discretionary trader. Its strength lies in the trader not being required to focus 100% one hundred percent of the time and also because a trader can trade a number of markets at a same time.

If you can't work out your exits yet, why don't you do what I suggested in the blog: take all your profits at the first logical scale point or at a fixed minimum profit objective. If your win rate is as high as it should be, you'll make money.

Since I started teaching Kiki to trade and writing the blog, I have received many, many emails from people who have turned their trading around and become CP (consistently profitable) by using what was in the blog. It's all in there. Providing mechanical setups for discretionary trading is not doing you a favour and I won't go down that road.

There is no free lunch to becoming a trader, a doctor, a lawyer or any profession. A student needs to follow the curriculum, study hard, do the practice. The exams then are easy.

SIM Trading is Boring and Trading Plans Suck

I have received hundreds of emails and comments from traders looking for CP in this business. Lots of them were very hard workers and put in a huge amount of effort and found success like the guy whose email I am pasting in below. Others are still on their way to CP, putting in the time, asking questions, SIM trading until they define their trades. Good on you all. I'll let this trader speak for himself:

Hi, I have sent you emails a few times pobably don't remember, asking very basic questions haha...

I have been studying everything I can about trading for 5months now, and lucky for me I happen to run into your blog about 4months ago, printed out every chart you have ever posted, read through every post and comments below, studied, analyzed and finally started practicing in simulation about 2 and a half months ago.

For about a half a month, I ended up loosing, I could not understand what you were trying to tell me, then looking farther into and studying more specifically how you enter your trades, what similarities I see and marking 2-3 requirements per trade, I went back to your charts to confirm that the same situation happened when the same type of trades were made.  I than went to my historical data for 5months, and started looking for the same entry criteria and started marking winner/looser, and why it won, and why it lost.

After loosing 15k, on 3 contracts for 3weeks, (mainly from trading too much at every turn), I decided to do as you say, and follow the exact setups I have marked in my plan.  I have written down a Continuation setup that I felt was the same as yours, as well as a reversal setup I felt you followed.  After 2months, I am now finally in profit at +3k, which is simply amazing and I have nothing but gratitude for all your help.

Looking through today's post you posted a single trade, with a chart.  Looking at that chart made me excited since the criteria, the way you read the order flow, all matched up exactly to how my reversal setup was marked in my plan, and could not help but send this long over due thank you email.

You have taken me from someone who knew absolutely nothing about day trading, to a CP in a matter of 4months, and have given me courage to finally choose to switch over to daytrading full time.  I will forever be greatful for all your hard work and generosity.  Thank you again.  SC

This is another great success story. I must have about 30 or so like this -  people, both male and female, all ages, who have become CP by following the way that I taught Kiki to trade. There are no free, easy shortcuts. The roadmap I have outlined in this blog has PROVEN to work for many different people of all walks of life and education. I truly believe it will work for most of you too. 

From weddings to health care

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. - Apparently I missed must-see TV on Sunday while attending my stepsister's wedding. Rather than cracking a tall, cool Budweiser and watching the totally bizarre vote on health care, I spent my night at the wedding on Florida's first coast.

Sure, I had fun throwing back a few while spending the night with my family, but I would have just LOVED to watch all the crazies (aka: Republican congressmen) march on D.C. just before voting against Obamacare. I mean, were the Republicans really applauding the protesters who spit on Democratic politicians and yelled gay/racial slurs? Did one Republican congressman really call a fellow colleague a "baby killer"?????

And here I thought the drunks at the wedding were out of control.

Do I love this bill? Not really, because I'd prefer a single-payer system where everyone pays and everyone benefits. But our democracy usually results in these types of unsatisfactory compromises. But I'm OK with that because this is a major step in the right direction.

Still, I would've liked to watch our infantile elected leaders interact in a way that makes rowdy wedding receptions look tame. Maybe next time.

Back to Basics - Going with the Flow

 Every day I get a number of comments to this blog as well as a host of emails. Many traders searching for CP seem to be caught up in looking at the trees rather than the forest.

I trade order flow and enter positions either leaning against support or resistence or when support or resistence is broken AND momentum is in my favour.

If reading order flow has been a problem, then one way of solving this is what I did with Kiki in the early days: ONLY TRADE OBVIOUS ORDER FLOW and pass on anything that is not 100% obvious. OK, you will miss a lot of trades and your profit per trade will be lower due to late entries but your WINRATE WILL BE HIGHER.

I think you know that for me, winrate is hugely important. Winrate is the centre of my universe because I can build everything on it: average profit per trade and more importantly, I can increase my size to earn what I need.

So when is the order flow obvious? Well, its in the eye of the beholder. For Kiki and me, it's the smoothed Cumulative Volume Delta.

Today's chart is not a trading chart but a chart that I have market up to show a trade that could have been taken when the order flow was "obvious". To get this trade, I first looked for a turn in the order flow from the smoothed CVD. I then qualified the bar for my momentum and support or resistence entry criteria to decide whether it's a trade or not. If not, I wait for the next bar and repeat the process.

If you look at  the marked entry bar, you can see the starting point of the analysis is the turned sCVD. Price had come down from a high. The bar before the marked entry bar, where I would have entered this trade as I am aggressive, showed the possibility of a change from BUYERS to SELLERS. The VB already clued me in. So when it was "obvious" that the order flow had turned, I saw it broke the EMA support and the CCI showed the momentum was down. A perfect trade. These major turns in the order flow are forgiving of a later entry as there is so much profit in the trade. These major turn are the ones that make your daily bread if you scale out rather than taking an all in-all out approach. The major turns are characterised by these new highs and lows. If you did your SIM work correctly, you will be able to recognise these easily.

Blue is dead...

We had a perfect tether flight on Saturday, followed by a bad free flight.
The vehicle started well, but as airspeed built up it started to spin.
It got to about 1Kft then started down. It went unstable probably due to the high rate of spin.
and started to leave the area of the pad and was heading toward the spectator area so I aborted. Both the software driven and RC only vent abort worked.
The vehicle is totaled.

The micro sd flash chip from the vehicle physically looks ok, but gets very warm when power is applied so I've gotten no data from the vehicle.

I had a camera pointed at the bottom of the motor with a good view of the vanes and if I can recover data from the video camera SD card it should provide some information.
The camera was destroyed on impact, the SD card is fine but the camera did not close the video file before impact. So it shows zero length.

Any advice on how to fix this?
My approach:
I've got some utilities for manipulating bare SD sectors that I use for my data logging cards.
Using this I wrote a utility to copy all the sectors off the Cameras SD card into a big file.
So the original card is safe and I won't mess with that.
I then wrote a short utility to copy the exact same sectors contents back onto a equal sized SD card. I'll then run chkdsk on this duplicate SD card.

One rub is that while the SD cards are the same brand and size they report slightly different numbers of physical sectors, will this mess up the FAT table accounting? The card I'm copying to has more sectors than the one off the camera.

The cards is formatted as FAT16 so I can start tracing clusters by hand and reassembling file chains, but its been along time since I did FAT table stuff by hand with a hex editor.
Any recommendations on good tools to do this?


If that does not work,
any other ideas on recovering the video data from the SD card?

Backtesting Trading Ideas

Several readers have asked me to talk about how to backtest.

Firstly, I backtest an idea.

I see something happening over and over again in the market, and if I think it may be useful to watch and trade, I write down exactly what I want I saw. For example, order flow was positive as VB and smoothed CVD were green, both EMAs GREEN, and Price pulls back to 33EMA. This is the idea I that I want to test.

I then print out ten days of charts (I can't work from a screen - even my 24 inch ones) and look for that idea. I mark the charts every time I see it.

Once the chart is marked I write down the entry price in a column with a number corresponding to the mark on the chart and whether it is a LONG or a SHORT. I then go back to the chart and see whether my first logical scale point is reached or whether my drop dead stop would be hit. I take out the statisctics on those trades and look for a high win rate. How high? Over 60%. If I get that, then I'm in business. I then look at all the winning trades and all the losing trades to see what else I can do to filter out only losers. My aim is to get to at least 70% win rate.

I want to see at least 50 trades for this exercise so you may need more than 10 days of charts if the idea doesn't happen often enough and you're still interested.

Next, I concentrate on the winning trades. I look to see what each trade would have made using my exit rules.

I then gather the statistics adding back the losing trades. I now can decide whether I have something I can add to my trading setups.

The final step of this backtesting for me is to program it. Up until recently I used MultiCharts Easylanguage. Kiki helped me with this. However, with MarketDelta I have Volume Delta which is hugely important for me in seeing order flow. MultiCharts only gave me upticks and downticks. I look back on about a year of data and also forward walk it too.

This can all be done manually but using a computer for programming the backtests obviously makes it quicker.

P.S.
1. MarketDelta  has better than excellent customer service and they can help with backtesting for their system
2. If your question hasn't been answered or you don't see it posted, please email them again, I've managed to delete some comments accidentally.  This time I'll blame it on jet lag.

 Today's trades are for the Bund. You can see that there were only 50% winning trades but the day ended GREEN.

Click to enlarge

Setups? What setups?

What are setups anyway? For me, a setup is a snapshot showing a picture of a point in time when there is a perceived direction of price for the next minimum scale out distance with sufficient momentum.

What my definition is saying is that the trader is not looking at the separate components that make up the picture. He is looking at the net of all the information that he has processed - the picture.

If I focus on individual components of the picture, I cannot "feel" what is actually happening in the market. Its not when this line crosses that but what it means when this line crosses that, something totally different.

So in creating setups, I define what I want to see in the picture and that may manifest itself by getting information in a number ways from a number of sources.

COMMENTS: I'll catch up and respond to as many as I can on the week-end. Its been pretty busy this week with Nick.  Just to let everyone know there have been some great suggestions for a new FloBot name.  It's been a nice diversion talking about the pros and cons of each name. Hopefully there will be a decision by the end of next week.

Today's trades are the Euro FX. I have shown entries only as an example of how FloBot logic can be used to enter trades and then let the trader manage them. You will see short trades in an obvious down trend and then sideways chop which FloBot avoided this time. When the down trend resumed, FloBot caught the move probably one bar later than an electroniclocal may have. That's the price for filtering out chop. In autotrading, its all about trade offs. I have not optimised all the rules yet - what to use and when -as we are not yet in that mode and there is still a lot of manual tweaking in what you see now.

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Is FloBot a Terrible Name?

I think I am very much in touch with the difficulties in becoming CP (consistently profitable). It is hard to forget my own pain in striving to become a trader for a living.

Kiki and I have been playing around with some ideas on how we can try using FloBot to turn a previously struggling trader into one that can make money while they are honing their skills. We both have some ideas about this which we are still discussing. We will talk about as soon as FloBot is ready and we have worked out something which we think is viable.

On another entirely different matter.

I got an email that basically said FloBot was a really terrible name.  What can I say, I wasn't a marketing major at Uni and neither was Kiki.

If you the readers can come up with a better name, that would be great.  The person who supplies the chosen name will receive a "surprise" related to their trading.

Now for todays trades. Its Euro FX futures. Another good market - aren't they all when you are making money! The logic was "all in and all out". The way FloBot is being set up is so that we can use logic exit rules or use monetary scale out points or both. Every setup will have an on and off switch so we can just trade one or more setups for any particular market. We will identify any setups not to use through automated back testing.

C

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Sweeps week

Who else is tired of these third-party health care reform commercials? I'm going to be sick if I see one more ad trying to sway Congress to vote for or against the health care bill. This feels more like a presidential campaign than the dog days of March. These commercials are amazingly annoying and don't really prove any points. One of them shows a hurricane hitting the Gulf Coast, as if that explains why Obamacare will allegedly kill grandma.

But what is more infuriating is that these commercials are aimed at U.S. Rep. Jason Altmire, who isn't my congressman. Instead, I'm stuck with the regrettable Tim Murphy, a Republican who has made it clear for months that he won't support any Democratic form of health care reform. Even thought I don't live in Altmire's district, I decided enough was enough and called his D.C. office. I told the receptionist that while I don't live in his district (although just 26 miles from the Aliquippa office) that many people in Western Pennsylvania do support reform.

But the commercials keep coming and this area isn't alone. We find out this week that Rep. Kathy Dahlkemper, D-Erie, is getting pounding by ads that she should not support a bill that the crazies claim won't adequately fund cancer... just weeks after both of her parents died of cancer.

Disgusting.

It's clear that these third-party organizations (cough cough, big-money corporations) are just slinging mud to see what sticks. And it appears to be a preview to the kind of garbage we can expect after the Supreme Court ruled in January that companies may spend relentlessly against political foes. Gee, I can't wait 'til November. Let the real games begin!

Getting ready part N..

I've made my cat pack. I've built new tethers, the only thing left on my list is re zero the one vane I had to take apart and do final electronics checkout. In the next day or so I'll modify the software to match what I'm flying in simulation.

I'll probably leave for FAR Friday night and do a tethered flight very early Saturday. I've done a lot of simulations and a flight to the 1200 ft limit of G airspace. (1000 ft to give me some margin) and back to the pad is easily within the most pessimistic performance parameters. So if the tether flight goes without problems I'll make that attempt on Saturday.

Higher than that and I'll need FAA authorization to enter controlled airspace. (Which they are unlikely to grant me until I actually stop being lazy and formally ask for it. )

When I get that I'll try the flight to 11K ft and back to beat DCX. With out some aerodynamic drag on the way down it has ~3% margin. As a result I've ordered a parachute from Fruity Chutes (blue of course) and I will setup to deploy the drogue at apogee and basically fall back to 1200 ft or so before powering up to land. The purpose of the chute is to keep the vehicle upright and limit the speed to 60mph or so. This will either require a very calm day or compensation for winds aloft. I need to mdoel this. I can just use forecast winds, or I have to study the FAA rules to learn what I need to do to release a small balloon to measure the winds right before launch.
(A small Xbee transmitter and GPS cost less than $100 and is very light so I can actually fly a small instrumented balloon.)

Rough calculation says 11K ft to 1K ft at 60mph takes 113 seconds. So a 10mph wind would cause 1600 ft of displacement. I'll need to be very close on the wind calcs to land back on the pad. I might be better off to fly from the lake bed near FAR.

Nick, My Family and I Thank You

Thanks everyone who sent Nick their best wishes. The posted comments and many emails were really wonderful. There were too many for me to be able to respond to individually so please accept this posting as my response. I am a believer in karma and I am certain all the expressions of good thoughts from all of you will help Nick in his battle.

This news is not something I would normally share so publically but I felt a responsibility to those who are relying on the blog and you should know why your questions are now not answered in a timely manner.  Old school values.

As you know, this is not the first time my family has been touched by the dark shadow of cancer and it makes me more determined to help stamp out or control this invisible predator in my small way.

I am continuing business as usual, as I find my routines are helpful in keeping me together. As a side note, writing this blog for Kiki has had a benefit for me - my trading has improved. My win rate is higher. I don't know whether it's the extra focus with people watching over my shoulder - greater accountability. Whatever it is, I want to keep it up for not only that reason but also because I have seen the difference it has made to quite a few of you. Not many of us have the priviledge of seeing something they do, providing a significant direct benefit to others.

P.S. - Never underestimate the power of going over your daily trading charts.

Thank you again.

Today's trades are for the US T-Bonds, a market I traded in the early 1980s when it had the largest volumes of any future market, about 300,000 contracts a day. Of course it was pit traded as there were no electronic markets. Customers phoned orders to a broker and often waited 10 minutes to find out of they had been filled.

This is still a great market. Look how smoothly it trades. Yesterday was more profitable than today but, hey, $700+ is not bad.

C

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The Wizard In OZ, Nick and the FloBot

A more serious note. The real reason I am here in Oz is because my son, Nick, was diagnosed with Hogkins Lymphoma about a week ago.  We are now at the staging phase of his treatment where they decide how progressed the disease has become and what type of treatment will work the best.  Here in Oz the life is slower and quieter, giving me a lot of time to think about the many things you do when something like this happens.

Having said that, the blog will be taking on a different flavour.  I have said before I don't trade when I am emotionally not 100% but I have to keep working as I will not be able to cope just sitting here....

So..........this leads me to the FloBot

I have been very quiet about the FloBot lately. as you may have noticed. The initial work that Kiki put into the project showed high win rates and profitability, I was amazed.  She tested it on so many markets using identical logic, and the EL orderflow method worked on them all, by only making one basic choice: the range bars that fit the rhythm of that market, and the stops. Because of these results on testing, I've decided to throw some real extra programming resources at it to bring out its full potential.

As I said early in the blog, I have about 18 setups I use. You have seen about 20% of these as Kiki progressed to CP.  Kiki's work convinced me that we should go the way of technology. The power of volume delta added to the setups and context I have developed means that a trader can now trade a large number of markets at a time, taking only the best trades.

I have seen a huge change in the role that traders have had in the markets over the last 30 years.  It seems that the trader's role now is to develop a robust methodology and let the technology do the manual labour, leaving the trader to concentrate on the brainwork. (Kind of like a prop room with computers doing the trading). I turned 64 recently and have realised I cannot keep my focus at 100% one hundred percent of the time, especially now with Nick being ill. On the other hand, I did develop an expert system where I worked at 100% capacity for a couple of months to create it and then can work at a much lower level of concentration while I let the technology execute my EL methodology. BTW, this isn't counting the 30 years of experience and several hundred thousand dollars of losses it took me to get where I now am.

We are in the final testing mode of the EL FloBot logic and I will be showing its trades in this blog. I have included a significant number of the 18 setups and will gradually add more, probably on a continuous basis over several months. There is both entry and exit logic as well as looking at context. The context logic is the most challenging as you will see in the entries taken.

For the next couple of months, while Nick is going through chemo, the blog will show the FloBot logic entries and exits plus some additional manual exits where me, as the trader, exited the trade manually for reasons I will set out. This will be the logic tweaking part of the project with the view to use these manual exits to further enhance the FloBot rules.

I'll also be adding my own comments and thoughts as posts and I will still give explainations on the trades as before. It's my same methodology you have been seeing everyday, only automated. I'll still be answering your questions, maybe not as quickly as before but I'll do my best.

The trades will cover a number of markets that we follow. I will try and pick the most interesting market every day and it will cover the whole 23 hour trading day if that market trades that long. FloBot never sleeps.

I will do my posts after the RTH close every day after 4.15 pm New York time which is now 9.15 pm London time and 8.15 am Sydney time (at this time of the year). I will also show the P and L of the day.

Tom

Here are the trades for the Ides of March. FloBot logic looks robust for the ES. I'll show other markets as the days go on. The last trade was the usual ES opposite trade which is the timeframe traders getting out before the close

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The demise of newspapers

Maybe I got out of the newspaper industry at just the right time. Local papers used to be the pillars of the community when they provided important information and uncovered stories that would otherwise have been swept under the rug. Now, they're nothing more than online sideshows in the age of blogs and Twitter.

Case in point: The Post-Gazette is promoting a live webcam video of Xante, a Golden Retriever puppy spending his weekdays in the newsroom. I wasted about 15 seconds watching Xante wag his tail this afternoon before moving on to more interesting things like washing my clothes. Is this P-G Puppy Cam really what Pittsburgh's top newspaper should be focusing its attention on?

Things seemed to devolve even more when the Observer-Reporter launched a contest today asking people to guess the mystery location where several Peeps marshmallows were staged for a photo. This seems to undermine the O-R's journalistic credibility by publishing something so trivial next to hard news. And with only two full-time photographers left on the payroll, why are they wasting anyone's time shooting a photo of marshmallows dressed up in baseball uniforms?

What really concerns me, though, is whether people find this more interesting than feature stories about people doing good and/or hard-hitting news articles that expose sleazy politicians. If so, then that makes me glad I'm a former newsman.

Take Me Home, Country Roads

Onward we march to the dance! So in honor of the West Virginia Mountaineers defeating Georgetown to win the Big East Tourney...

Maths in Oz - DDStop

I want set out the stop loss policy I have in this and other posts as there seems to be some clarification needed.

Firstly, for me a "trade" is a multiple of 3 contracts.  Kiki and I trade in multiples of 3 contracts. This is to allow us to scale out but also to go all in and all out if the situation calls for it.

I have a concept called "drop dead stop" (DDStop) which is the most I will want to lose on any one trade ( a trade being 3 contracts).

The usual DDStop is about the length of two range bars of the market I am trading.

For the ES,  I trade 5 tick range bars. So two range bars is 10 ticks. That is $125 per contract or $375 per trade.

For the DowEuro50 its also 5 tick range bars but the maths becomes 300 Euro per contract due to its tick value of 10 Euro.

I adjust this DDStop for each trade to fit the context of the trade. I also do not use the DDStop as an exit mechanism. I usually do not allow my stops to be hit but rather exit on the market's dynamics during the trade. My entries are usually so correct in terms of order flow and momentum, I will bail if I see I read the market wrong, a long time before the stop is hit. New traders need to be wary of this as they can easily be chopped up. The SIM trading is designed to take care of this and you will have learned how to do this because I don't think you can get to CP without it.

Getting in on the conversation

Char Jeggle, of Shadyside, second from the left, talks about the essence of man, good vs. evil, during a conversation salon at Upper St. Clair Public Library. Photo by Jasmine Goldband/Tribune-Review

By Michael Jones
For the Tribune-Review
March 11, 2010

Even as human contact migrates to the Web, the Allegheny County Library Association is getting people together to talk -- face to face.

Conversation salons, where philosophical and newsworthy topics are broached and everyone has a say, have become a hit locally and across the country in the age of Facebook.

"We're all on computers now, and we don't have as much personal involvement with each other," said Lee Boyd, a salon organizer at Upper St. Clair Library. "I think we need more of that. It's nice to meet people in the community with wisdom on issues."

Conversation salons date back hundreds of years ago to The Enlightenment, when people discussed philosophy and new scientific discoveries. They first returned to Western Pennsylvania about nine years ago as a way to get retirees interacting on a regular basis.

Now, 10 area libraries hold monthly salons with attendance ranging from a few to up to 20 people.

"We didn't have to work at all to drag people in or entice them," said Norm Wien, who helped promote the early salons. "There's this subset of people who like to converse in a polite and respectful way, and it caught on right away."

A group of 17 people met last week in the Mt. Lebanon Public Library, with the chairs positioned in a circle so all could be included.

"If it gets bigger than that, they don't get their dibs in," Wien said. "If it gets too small, then you lack the diversity of the viewpoint."

Most people in this particular group are from Mt. Lebanon, but a few are from other South Hills communities. Joe Meltzer, the group's facilitator -- or referee -- got the conversation started.

"The first topic is immigration," Meltzer said before throwing his arms up in the air. "Go!"

Read more...

Couldn't Sleep

I couldn't sleep Thursday night (Oz time). Won't trade Hang Seng Friday. Looks like my body is still on European time. I just love this ES. It really trades well for my methodology. This is the ES for Thursday night, OZ time.

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Down the Yellow Brick Road to CP Part 2

After looking at the markets for a couple of days from the Oz point of view, I remembered again why I left here in the early 1980's to trade the U.S. markets from Europe.

For me, it's just a lot easier to make money trading the U.S.and European markets which are more mature and have higher volume. Asia is still the tail and it's not wagging the dog. China is a powerhouse that will eventually show its strength but not yet. The consumers here don't have the same strength as the U.S. and European consumers and it's the consumer who rules. It's not that you can't make money in Asian markets because you can, and lots of it. It's just that I don't think I would make as much as I consistently do back in the Euro/ U.S. world. Even on a quiet day back there I can usually make my minimum without really taking on much extra risk. That's not the case in Asian markets. When it gets quieter in Asia you have to take on considerably more risk to make yout daily nut. But if it's your only game in town then you need to set your risk/reward parameters in your trading plan and trade accordingly. I think that it just means that for every dollar of capital you will earn less here than in Euro or US land. I guess its also the style of the markets.

You then need to firm up your setups. You can do this in either of at least two ways: You can create them from scratch after doing all the reading and looking at my trades, or, you can reverse engineer my trades.

To do the reverse engineering, print out all the charts and then sort and mark the trades that have a lot in common. I would look for as many trades as I could find and categorise them in a broad way. Then go over each winning trade and look what happened when the entry was made. Once you have done this on 40 or 50 trades you will come to a conclusion on what makes a good entry. Write this down for each type of trade, separately for longs and shorts. You now have a basic setup.

Next, SIM trade the setups using the first logical scale out point for an all out exit. You will then probably see that your "rules" need tweaking. Make those changes and test them again in SIM, Keep doing this until you are happy with the result. Being happy with the result means that you can go over a chart and with HINDSIGHT you ARE CONSISTENTLY PROFITABLE using your rules.

Now, you need to develop that "muscle memory" in SIM using replay, very slow at first. Painfully slow, bar by bar. Then go to normal speed or faster. When you are CP on replay you can graduate yourself to real time SIM. This is where you perfect your skills at reading what is going on. This will not be a short process. Keep going until you are CP.

Todays Hang Seng trades had a bit more volatility and follow through. That lunchtime break is not my favourite thing.

C

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"A census taker once tried to test me..."

Although that classic line by Hannibal Lecter in "The Silence of the Lambs" is bone-chilling, it isn't enough to deter me from working as a census enumerator this spring. The U.S. Census Bureau contacted me this week to hire me for the part-time job that offers a lifeline in this economic abyss. At $15.25 per hour for up to 30 hours each week, it's a nice gig if you can get it. This part-time job also should replace unemployment compensation during the eight weeks the feds need me to knock on doors counting heads.

I'm excited to begin my training in a couple weeks, but am somewhat concerned that people will shy away from this constitutionally mandated count because the federal government is held in such low esteem. Now, I'm not so much worried about who might be on the other side of the door (I've been to plenty of funky neighborhoods as a newspaper reporter) but I do wonder if people will actually answer my questions when I come knocking. There is no need to worry about privacy, though, because it will be 72 years before your basic answers are released. And those answers become fascinating reference points for future generations interested in genealogy.

Not to sound like a PR shill, but the census is important because it decides how federal money is directed and helps to shape our state legislative and congressional districts. And after watching the cluster that has become our state/federal governments, do we really want our local communities on the short end of this legislative mess?

So do us all a favor and mail in your census forms when you get them this month. Otherwise, I might be searching for you in the coming weeks, although I promise not to be too testy.

Starting Down the Yellow Brick Road to CP

I have recently been getting a number of the same types of questions, over and over again so I think I need to say some more about how to use this blog to help you get to CP (consistent profitability).

In the next few days I will post a series that answers these "how to" questions that can act as a starting point to seeking CP. I will also post this series in KEY POSTS as "The Yellow Brick Road."

OK, you found this blog and it looks to you that we are doing something here that fits the way you want to trade. First step is to read the blog from beginning to end, including the comments, looking at the trades on each chart, trying to work out why the trade was taken. You can print out the blog/comments if needed as a reference.

Next, you read through the blog and the comments a second time now knowing a lot more about how we trade as you have already read the blog, but this time taking notes on the charts that will help you create your own trading "rules". Perhaps you will need to do this more than once. Write these rules down, this will be your first attempt at your trading plan.  Trading plans evolve so don't worry.  I'll talk about this later.

You now should have your own ideas of what a trade setup consists of. The entry trigger for these trade setups are bar close. As a first step, I would, in SIM, only look to exiting trades "all out" at the first logical scale point. This way, you can concentrate on entries and trying to achieve a high win rate without worrying about how to maximise the profits on each trade. That can come later.

The first decision you need to make is which market to trade. It should be a market with the highest daily volume in the timezone you want to trade in. There are markets trading 24 hours a day in different parts of the world so everyone can find a market that is tradeable before or after their working hours so that they can achieve CP in SIM while they are still holding down a job that pays the bills, saving up money for their trading capital.

Next, you need to setup your charts using range bars as your single trading chart. Finding the "correct" settings is easy once you use a bit of logic. The range bar length needs to look to eliminate the "noise" from the market while revealing the vertical movement clearly. The first rule I have is that the length of my range bar should be such that my drop dead stop loss should be no more than the length of two range bars plus a tick. This will give you a maximum value for the range bar. For exanple, for the ES I use 5 tick range bars as I am happy with a drop dead stop loss of $312.50 per contract. I exit most trades well before this limit is hit but I am prepared to lose $312.50 per contract on every trade should I not be able to get out cheaper. Don't have your drop dead stop too close as you will get stopped out of winning trades and you will begin using the stop as an exit mechanism rather than letting the market tell you when to exit both at a profit and a loss.

You find the correct settings by eye balling the chart. I go a step further by using a computer program to test the profitability of different range bar settings for specific setups but you can do a similar thing manually, although it takes longer to do. I'll speak about this in another post.

More tomorrow.

Today's trades below. Not much happening in the Hang Seng and it is acting quite subdued.

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The Number 1 Reason Why Traders Lose + Hang Seng

I was on board flying to Oz when I was writing this post. I flew London to Hong Kong and connected to a flight to Sydney. I can highly recommend Cathay Pacific if anyone ever decides to do this marathon flight, about 24 hours airport to airport.

I got to chatting with the guy sitting next next to me and the talk reached the fact that I was a trader. He was an older guy than I was, very intelligent and well informed. He asked me a question: "why do most people lose money trading?"

We went through all the usual answers including emotional, psychological and other similar things. None of the reasons we concluded were due to people not being able to learn the mechanics of trading nor was it because they couldn't find setups.

After a few hours of this we concluded that the reason boiled down to three reasons:

1. Losing the money on a stopped out trade mattered to the trader

2. The trader did not have a detailed trading plan that took care of whatever happened during the trading day,and 

3. If the trader did have a proper trading plan, he did not follow it because of the fear of loss in point 1.

I mentioned this right at the beginning of this blog when I suggested that traders start out trading the very minimum size until they achieved CP (consistent profitability).

So, the reason that traders lose money boils down to the old negotiating saying:"He who cares most, loses."

This is what a trader has to beat to be CP. Kiki did it by developing her "muscle memory" on SIM so everything became a reaction to the obvious - setup by setup. Kiki went live on a setup as  soon as she was CP on that setup. This provided positive reinforcement of bringing in earnings as she got the next setup ready.

I know I have posted on this subject before but it seems to me that this is what makes the difference between achieving CP or not.

So how do you cope if you are down to your last $25,000 or less, and need to feed your family from your trading?

Firstly, you have back-tested your trading plan up the kazoo so you REALLY BELIEVE!!!!

Secondly, you SIM trade until you don't have to think to put on a trade. You see and you do. The seeing involves processing all the information at the close of each bar and coming to a conclusion without any hesitation. If you need to think and consider then you have not done enough SIM.

Thirdly, you have the stats of your methodology from SIM so know what to expect in live trading.

Now make sure you really BELIEVE and trade what you see, as focused and unemotionally as you did in SIM.

Today's trades in the Hang Seng Futures, "the road runner". This market is all "beep beep" and "zoom". So I trade it all in and all out. Today's trading was quite subdued compared to what I saw before. This market has become very interesting as it is impacted by both the U.S. and China and I haven't worked out how. But trading it by order flow means I don't really have to understand it, just trade it. There is one complicating factor with this market - it stops for lunch and then restarts again. Taking a position over lunch carries extra risk. By the way, as I haven't traded this market for a long time, I traded just a one lot today. I'll increase my size tomorrow to something more meaningful and if I don't make too many mistakes I'll post P&L after that.

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Jet Lagged

Jet Lagged so no trading or post for Monday.  Hopefully will be back at it tomorrow and I will also try to get the backlog of comments answered.

Photog for Hire

By Greg Tarr
BLB Guest Blogger

Never thought I'd use it again, but I held onto it anyway. Who knows, one of these days I may just be a member of the press again. It's a long shot considering since June 24 (lay off day) I haven't applied for a single photojournalist position or even considered it. But in the console of my car still sits a Pennsylvania Newspaper Association parking tag from 2008. And I'm glad it was still there.

Thursday at 3:45 a.m., I went outside to get into my car so I could head to work. Work? I'll get to that a little later. Quarter to four in the morning? I can explain that too.

I wasn't expecting a layer of frost on my windows, but it was there. Unfortunately, my ice scraper was in the garage. Instead of going back in and wasting time, I reached in my pocket for my driver's license (a great scraper in a pinch) but it wasn't there. That was in the house, too. Finally, what do I find looking up at me just waiting to be used again? Used for anything at this point? My PRESS parking tag. A little flimsy, to be honest, but it got the job done.

So what job was I scrambling to make it to for a 4:00 a.m. start time? I'm a part-time employee at Target working mostly in the stockroom. I've been working there since the beginning of November. Retail is a different world from what I am used to, but it's going. I've met some new friends and I get a 10 percent discount. That's really all there is to say about the job.

Now, about the photo business. I secured the funds to purchase photography equipment a few months ago and have been picking up little photo jobs here and there. I have four weddings booked for 2010 as of right now and I have a few others pending. The first wedding is coming up May 8 in Chicago. Before you start to think that I'm already a famous wedding photographer traveling the United States, I'm going to be honest. It's a friend's wedding. I'm excited about the future and can't wait to start shooting.

So there's a little update on what I've been doing with my time. If you know anyone out there looking for a very reasonably priced photographer cutting his teeth as a new business owner, I know a guy.

Greg Tarr previously worked as a staff photographer at the Observer-Reporter in Washington, Pa. He can be reached by e-mail at gmtarr@hotmail.com, or visit his photography website at www.gregtarrphoto.com