Price Patterns

We have all tried to use indicators to build a system, I have tried to use them to build an auto trading system and have found that it’s not worth the effort of looking for a great combination of indicators only. You need to use price action first and foremost. Support and resistance with a few other gems like a simple momentum and moving average are, to me, what works.

I have also found that indicators and patterns are just another way of looking at the same price action. Now that I've been staring at indicators for a long time and understand price action, and memorized patterns such as head and shoulders, bull flag, etc, understating basic price action has allowed me to forget about all that stuff. It's all just another way of saying higher high, higher low. If you read the book you might also have this "moment". After watching Alphatrends videos and reading Brian Shannons new book, the approach that makes the most sense to me is support and resistance, higher high, lower low, etc. For auto trading, the trick is to be able to program the rules as you apply them when looking at a chart, into software. Not so easy.

I trade Forex based on an auto trading system I developed, currently, no real money as there are still bugs. I also trade the TSX stocks (real money) based on the approach demonstrated in Brian Shannon's book. Each night I’ll perform a scan of the TSX and set up the trades for the next day. My approach has been altered somewhat since reading his book. The original was based on reading his blog and watching his videos. I have created code to scan for these stocks that are in stage 2 or 4. So far so good. Obviously it would be more profitable to check on the trades intra day and adjust the stops to protect profit. That doesn't seem to be the most damaging though. The entries are planned to be on a stage 1 to 2 short time frame but a morning gap usually kills me as it retraces. This doesn't happen all the time. TWS (IB platform) does allow conditional orders but not to the extent I need them. I need to look for a pullback to a level, then a break above another level (buy stop) to pull the trigger. To do this I will need to program Amibroker to follow the stock and place the order. That's my next project after I get this auto trading forex code working well enough to make some $. As for the TSX, its working out, but it would be more profitable if I had the code mentioned above implemented.