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Strategies & Market Trends : Technical Analysis - Beginners -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MechanicalMethod who wrote (11122)	1/30/2001 10:36:35 PM
From: Michael Watkins	Respond to of 12039

MM, I don't tinker with the code as much as I used to. I moved to Tradestation from WOW (and its Metastock-like language) because TS has a much better development environment and as an ex programmer I appreciate that. Had a bunch of fun, and today I use virtually zero of the solutions I developed. I frequently joke that I'm a reformed systems trader but around here that might unduly raise eyebrows - so I'll refine that comment and say that I used to system trade but found that discretionary trading based on price and volume was more suited to my temperment. Picking a style that makes sense to the trader is very important I'm sure you know. I also never did like the abstraction of price and volume via indicators, even though I had plenty of them whirling about me. I certainly am not suggesting that a trend following system can't be devised to be profitable. I have a couple of lovely ones in the archives that on paper do very well in a a trending market. Importantly, money management is key. I used to run several daily scan, running further tests against the scan output candidates, and then visual inspecting the charts and picking out the likely ones, planning and executing trades etc. My life as a discretionary futures trader is simpler. Thousands of charts (stocks and futures) later, and some good lessons learned, its fairly easy apply some simple rules to price and volume to detect trend changes in different time frames, note and plan around consolidation zones, and take advantage of retracements when its trending. This approach sits with me well intellectually and the high leverage of futures allows me to be make a decent return with very little capital and still be flat every night, which I prefer. Not to mention shorting on a downtick, which has long been my favorite direction.