|
PureBytes Links
Trading Reference Links
|
When I first started writing strategies (intraday), I experimented with
tick charts. This was beginning of last year. Then I came up with
something that looked really good. I started trading it, and had one
month when I literally printed money (in % terms to my modest account).
I was ecstatic. This was 09/2003. Then a funny thing happened. I not
only didn't make money on that strategy, but lost 25% of September's
winnings in October. Although the losses weren't big, I went into
shock... my holy grail, not working!! It took me a while to realize
why... the volume in russell emini has almost doubled - all of a sudden.
I get double the number of bars for the same tick interval.
If you are thinking, well, of course - it wasn't very apparent to me at
that point of time. But I learnt my lesson, and threw away all my tick
strategies. My monkies run on minute charts now.
But, I still have a tick chart up (really like them), on which I base my
intraday discretionary trading. Trouble is, I am always tinkering with
the bar interval. I seem to like the tick interval best when I get about
100-130 bars in the whole RTH.
Which brings me to the question - would any of you gurus like to share
some insights on how to get around this dillema? Like some kind of
analysis on the weekend to decide what interval to use for the entire
next week, maybe? OR maybe do this every nite? Doing this intraday seems
pretty disruptive.. I go like "Oh man.. big volume today.. bump up the
interval".
Also, I cut my teeth trading in Woodies chat room. I learnt a lot of
good stuff, and currently spending time unlearning some of what I
learnt. Over there, people seem to pick fib numbers for tick chart
interval, like 233, 377 etc. Is that fairly regular practice? Should I
bother? Or just pick nice round numbers like 300, 400 etc?
Thanks much!
Abhijit
|