Wednesday 27 February 2013

More on Median Line analysis;

Dow Jones futures big picture, large structure going back to July last year;


And closer, showing recent bounce off median line;



Meanwhile Peter Campbell of M3 financial sensethinks today's action has set a trap;

Monday 25 February 2013

Statistics

I've just signed up for a introductory course on descriptive statistics offered by UC Berkeley via a www.edx.org, from the website;



"ABOUT edX

EdX is a not-for-profit enterprise of its founding partners Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that features learning designed specifically for interactive study via the web. Based on a long history of collaboration and their shared educational missions, the founders are creating a new online-learning experience with online courses that reflect their disciplinary breadth. Along with offering online courses, the institutions will use edX to research how students learn and how technology can transform learning–both on-campus and worldwide. Anant Agarwal, former Director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, serves as the first president of edX. EdX's goals combine the desire to reach out to students of all ages, means, and nations, and to deliver these teachings from a faculty who reflect the diversity of its audience. EdX is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts and is governed by MIT and Harvard."

It's the first part of a 3 part course that initially goes into regression, standard deviation, scatter diagrams, and my goal here is to be able to pick up some techniques to be able to assess data (ie results from trading) in a scientific way that will lead to meaningful conclusions.

There are quite an eclectic mix of courses offered - you can check them out athttps://www.edx.org/courses. 

Andrew's pitchfork

Yesterday I started looking at a different type of analysis work that gives structure and context to a market, its called median line and involves using Andrews pitchforks and looks very interesting indeed. Indeed I noted what looked like a good position to short, 6 am yesterday then had other plans for the day and later saw it was an excellent point to have shorted equity markets.


NASDAQ futures 
Posted Image

Interestingly it meshes well with another type of analysis I do that compares equity markets to currency markets.

Highly intriguing for the positively deviant. 

Pairs trading strategy - nil point


I finished an assessment of my futures pairs trading strategy, not only does it just show a minimal edge but there was also a flaw in the construction in the indicator, (this probably explains the minimal edge). When the indicator was reconfigured with the correct formula, the amount of trade signals given was very low, so I've put that strategy on the shelf for now, I may come back to it at some point.

Sunday 10 February 2013

I've been on a bit of a mission lately upgrading my system to make it run at it's best.  I started upgrading the 4GB memory to 8GB and that did speed things up a bit however the machine was running in 32 bit, rather than 64-bit and I only had Windows Home Premium 32-bit (however my processor is 64-bit).  So I got Windows Ultimate 64-bit and a 160GB solid state drive, backed up all my important data, installed the Solid State Drive,  set about re-installing Windows, then upgraded to the latest 64-bit version of Multicharts.  

What a fantastic difference it made upgrading to 64-bit and getting the Solid State Drive.  It now runs as a computer should, silently, no hard drive access sounds.  It's very quick, you start an application it starts up very quickly.  For example in iTunes if you double click a song it plays immediately.  It's essentially like I have a completely new machine, and I only spent a few hundred pounds.

Multicharts, (trading system) starts up quicker and allows me to interrogate data/charts so much quicker. 

Tuesday 5 February 2013

Siming

Another profitable trade on SIM, I went long the NASDAQ DOW futures spread;


I previously always scoffed at using a SIM account, always trading my live account, and only ever used the SIM to try out the occasional new idea or order type, I never took the SIM seriously.  As a result the balance in the SIM account was steadily depreciating however now it is steadily appreciating it does appear to be pretty useful, when it's used properly.  If I can see consistency here I'll switch back to trading my actual account.