Change of direction...for me not the market necessarily

Today I decided not to do any real trading at all. All of my back testing has been productive and virtually profitable at first glance although I have not run everything to see exactly how profitable and how much of a factor fudging against me may have. Normally I run my theories and trials with real trading, yesterday I started to, but due to it being a holiday I only had time to get one trade in...I made a few dollars so that was OK.

So, instead of real trading I did some fake trading for the morning. I expected a range day which should be the worst type of day for me typically. A good test of my newish plan and I felt like keeping some of my cash in the event that I am off with my strategy...yes, that is new for me.

I have some new rules that incorporate a new revamped TICK chart with some cascading moving averages to act as guides. Their overall relative position play a role in deciding how tight to stop the trades. Their position relative to each other help to determine entry points along with the absolute TICK value. Of course the price charts of SSO and SDS and sector ETFs can help to lend some credence to the trade ideas.

I'll post some charts of some of my back testing and some of my fake trading from today later. I would like to compare the back testing stop exits against more realistic fake live testing.

It is worth noting that I did my back testing using only the TICK chart for entry determinations by advancing the chart a bar at a time. I placed arrows where I wanted in to set the time. The price would be determined by crosschecking the appropriate price chart after the fact and using the average of the high, low and close for the minute even though I should get close to best price based on the timing with the TICK. This allows my to treat these as mostly blind trades as I won't recognize the TICK chart pattern but I do tend to recall price chart patterns as they set up.

I just went back to the live charts and saw a nice TICK pattern setup, placed an arrow and checked the price chart a little while later. TICK is remaining above zero, averages slowly trending up. This setup was nicely confirmed by the high and close from yesterday acting as a support price. While I did not need to see the TICK for this trade the TICK did also set it up independent of the price support. I'll check later to see where it ended up based on my stop setting rules.

Jeff.