(click to enlarge)

(sorry I’m leaving out the time on these shots… I’ve got the internals of the arrows in subgraphs and I can’t show you those!)

Now, the interesting thing about this screenshot is that I pulled up the historical data. You might astutely ask: aren’t the volume indicators only realtime? Well, on the ninja version, I made it so that if it doesn’t have the realtime indicator data, it leaves that out of the equation! I’m trying that out mainly because I want to see if the indicator is of any use on FX markets.

This chart looks good, anyway! The short trade is a loss, but at least it only tried short as price pushed to a lower low. Makes sense for a trend-following system, at any rate. Maybe in real-time volume would have kept us out… no way to tell. No matter how you slice it, you made big money on FDAX last night. I’ll be keeping my eye on this…

[Edit: someone wanted an 8-tick range NG natural gas futures chart, so here is today's session so far. A much messier chart, so I included High Level Chop as well. This way you can see how HLC keeps you out of most of the trades that go nowhere.]

You can see that the new arrows are doing quite well. They also caught a 10-point move on the 4-tick ES range chart at the same time, though it doesn’t look quite as good:

In all cases, the idea is to get in on the yellow arrows and try to hold for the biggest move you can stand. If you are already out when getting cyan arrows, then if you think the move has more legs then you can scalp more out of it. If the first arrow you get in a move is blue, then be more cautious if you go for it. Smaller targets are probably appropriate, and all that.

“The Brooks approach — like any approach which focuses on indicators or candles or bars or some other form of illustration — is a contradiction in terms, i.e., if one is trading price action by trading bar by bar, then he’s trading bars, not price action, substituting the bars and whatever setups are created with them for the indicators that he’s worked so hard to put behind him.”

(From a traders laboratory post)

(Referring to Reading Price Charts Bar by Bar: The Technical Analysis of Price Action for the Serious Trader)

It’s been fun throwing them on random charts and seeing how they do. I never did that before because I was too lazy to set up all the parameters.

We know lots of folks have had trouble setting up some of our indicators on markets besides ES. It can be done, but it takes some work. This will be a big step towards automating all of that.

… At least, it will be a big step if it works. I only did the coding on them today, and the algorithms are new, so it will take lots of time and experimentation to see if they meet our needs. Still, I’m pretty happy with every chart I place these on so far. Only a few places that make me wince a little. That’s promising.

Hello Richard, It has been enjoyable watching you evolve in your study of the markets. From a slightly cocky and arrogant ( which is sometimes necessary to have ) to this sweet guy that wants to dance with the market. Remember the old etrade commercial? Anyways you seem to have a very good mathematical and creative mind. My question is what is your experience and knowledge with matrix theory, combinatorics and graph theory? There is a much more arsonal of tools than what the heard mentality uses. Where did you go to school and what is your studies/degree. Appreciate the feedback and be cool… sincerely, (name removed)

… then today, I get this from the same person:

to richard: It does not suprise me that you do not reply to my email? Move the markets??? what a joke! It should be move WITH the market dot com. There is no place for EGO in the market!!! When you are wrong you must admit it. And we are all wrong at times… human nature. You are fooling yourself with your indicators.. INDICATORS ARE A JOKE! The truth is YOU CANNOT TRADE BIG LOTS.. you are not GENETICALLY WIRED FOR IT. There is an electrical impulse that is triggered off and you will never get over the FEAR of LOSING MONEY… good luck, (name removed)

Dude… give me at least a couple days to respond before you go all postal. I’m sure your mother told you how special you were before helping you climb into the padded short bus every morning, but I get a large mix of fanmail and hatemail every day. Just not usually from the same person! Sometimes, especially around US holidays, I get a backlog that I have to work through later.

Anyway, I have a party to go to… I just couldn’t resist posting this little bit of website-owner joy. Keep that in mind if you ever want to start a website: it brings out all kinds of people.

Enjoy!

As you can see, they report volume, which gives them a leg up on most other trading platforms, if you can believe it!

Anyway, I also wanted to try out a new screencapture program, to see if it cures the audio sync issues I’ve been having for over a year now. Here’s hoping…

You can have the ninja quick-and-dirty PnF code for free on our forums.

I want to thank him for all the great videos he’s put out. Thanks, man!

“If you enter before the bar closes, you might occasionally make a tick or so more on your trade. However, once or twice every day, the signal that you thought was going to happen does not and you will lose about eight ticks. That means that you need about eight early entries to work as planned for every one that does not, and that simply won’t happen.”

(from Reading Price Charts Bar by Bar: The Technical Analysis of Price Action for the Serious Trader)

My thoughts exactly!