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Strategies & Market Trends : E-Mini Pit -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: the-phoenix who wrote (503)	2/12/2002 5:30:54 PM
From: fut_trade	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 11288

"When I said I shorted all day, I meant I had a bunch of trades on the short side, and none on the long side. I didn't hold short all day, obviously" What I meant is that it is difficult to make money trading small time scales when the market is not moving much. The smaller the time scale, the more random the nature of price fluctuations, and the more difficult it is to trade because with each trade you must overcome commissions and slippage just to break even. If you consistently make good money doing this, then you have a trading system that works great! "Your comments on backtesting a pattern recognition strategy are no clearer, however. No timeframe, risk parameters, etc." I just did a quick scan using a procedure that has worked for me in the past. The numbers that I got showed in this one instance that selling at yesterday's high doesn't perform well for my analysis approach. I'm sure it works for other systems and parameters, but I would not call yesterday's high a magic resistance number. I'm not trying to get too critical here, but I was wondering what your reason was? "But, no, I have not personally backtested such a strategy, because it is only one part of any setup that I would look to trade" For me, backtesting has become very important. Some people may look at one or two set-ups and make a determination as to whether a system is good or not. But for every system I've ever looked at, one can find months or years where the system performs terribly with a substantial drawdown. I think one needs to look at hundreds of set-ups before one can decide whether or not a system is any good, and that is only feasible by way of backtesting. JMHO "I am puzzled by this statement. So what generated your buy signal at 1001.50 for today? If the market were to reach that price today, it would have been heading down, so you must have expected support in that area, since you clearly would have been trading in the opposite direction from current price movement??" Buying at a fixed percentage dip from the opening on other trading days having a pattern similar to the one I used for today has done very well historically. I suppose there could be some support figured in there somewhere, but I do not look at support and resistance levels specifically. "Maybe you could tell us more about how your system works. We certainly need more ideas here than the few, paltry ones that I come up with." Someone recommended a book where the author uses trading patterns for futures: Message 16968836 My approach is not radically different from his. BTW, I just did a quick scan for tomorrow, and I don't "see" any good trades for tomorrow. So I won't trade the SP/ES contract. Between currency, equity, and financial futures, I can usually find at least one good trade per day.