Buy Zone? Sell Zone? I'm sure it is all "just a little bit of history repeating!"
Hello TRO,
Me Tarzan, you Jane?
Ok, maybe not Jane, but you might be able to help me and I might be able to help you. Who am I? I've gone by many names on many forums over the years and have been banned on a few of them, too. I wear my banned rate like a badge of honor and I do it with dignity - for all of my banned usernames have been attached to trades that cause brokers and their sponsors to lose money - but that's another story.
Anyway, I spent most of my years on this business learning how to engineer my trading system in Excel. As a direct consequence, what little API coding skills I had many moons ago, have disappeared, seemingly. I could take the time to get my chops back, but I just don't have the time anymore. Besides, when I left programming, a WSDL was the "new and hot" thing and XSLT was just coming onto the market as "viable." Of course, now days, I'm reading technical documents online telling the reader that Microsoft can now turn your Excel 2007 into a Real-Time Data Server. They call it RTD and wrote the base as COM.
The problem (at least for me) is that I'm not up to speed on the various .Net paths yet and really don't plan to be either - too many other things to do. But, from what I read, in order to get Excel to talk to a real-time datafeed "intelligently," I'd have to turn it into an RTD Server. But, according to my forward thinking, even if you were able to get Excel to receive FX data from a vendor in real-time, you still run into the latency problems that come from data servers constantly going off-line from time-to-time.
Because of these technical problem or my lack of programing skill (or, the time to develop that skill), I've only been able to use Daily, Weekly and Monthly bars in Excel. Far more easier to manage when the datafeed goes off-line, because most datafeeds don't stay off-line for more than 24 hours at a time. Thus, there are no missing Daily bars of data when the server does go off line for a few minutes to a couple of hours, in most cases.
However, lately, I've been wanting to take my system to the next level and that means giving my Excel based system access to both historical AND real-time data in the lower time-intervals (such as: M1, M5, M15, M30, H1 and H4), in addition to the Daily, Weekly and Monthly bars. Yes - I can build an Excel based parser and use the FxDialogue Tick Collector in Excel 2007 to bring in the live tick data.
However, when the MT4 Server goes off-line (and it will - it always does) periodically, Excel won't have the ability to query the MT4 Server for the latent ticks - nor will Excel be able to parse those ticks into their respective Cell locations, to maintain the flow and structure of the streaming data - as if MT4 had never gone off line. So, using Excel in the real-time mode, for data that streams in the OHLC format, without turning Excel into a serious SmartDocument, is a non-starter, because of the off-line latency issues when the source goes down - for whatever reason.
So, how does this pertain to you? LOL, thanks for asking. Remember that movie
CONTACT? Yeah, that one.
Well, remember when Dr. Eleanor Arroway, ran out of funding and then later made the discovery of the lifetime, but needed funding to continue her research? [no - I'm not offering you money, lol!] Recall, how she made presentation after presentation, looking for someone to have the slightest bit of wonderment in their thought process. Eventually, she ended up at an "organization" that ultimately funded her research. However, all the while, Eleanor thought that she was the one doing the "searching" - when in fact, it was Eleanor that had been the one who was
being researched the entire time. Remember that movie?
Well, life is sometimes stranger than fiction.
I guess you could say that I'm something of an S.R. Hadden of Hadden Industries and you are something of a 'Dr. Arroway', Research Scientists.
There is a wealth of
information about the markets embedded in the code that describes all market behavior. They are two (2) simple variables and together they make up what you call the ATR - of course - I call it, Omega. Every financially traded market has its own encoded DNA signature. Locked within each strand of market DNA, is the code to
unlock it. Well, I've unlocked the code.
However, I did it
manually and doing so, is a completely non-efficient method for long-term, sustainable trading. It takes too much time and it leaves too much room for error. The key, is to
automate the process and that cannot be done without
real-time access to the lower time-intervals - right down to the Minute Bar.
From the looks of things, you know how to handle MT4, for such a task as this. Do you want a better "Buy Zone?" Well, that's easy. A better "ready-set-go" Trigger? That's easy, too. Need a better way to determine time-interval "Bias?" Done. Everything gets easier when you understand the signature of market behavior.
You are correct - there are no such things as Trends. Trends are Trader pacifiers. They sooth the Trader's soul, for but a moment - until - they snap-roll into the opposite direction and give the Trader whiplash. The Trend is not your friend, however, that which makes up the Trend, is most definitely your friend, because that contains the DNA of the market behavior that makes up the so-called, "Trend."
I need something done in MT4, that I don't have the time or the energy to figure out for myself [though I easily could]. Time, has become more valuable to me than it used to be and right now, I'm engaged in other things that require most of my time.
In return, Research Scientist Dr. Arroway, gets to participate in the game of the century. Like Dr. Arroway, YOU will be responsible for figuring out the Primer. However, rest assured, the Primer is there.
Recall, Hadden's first rule of Government spending - "why build one when you can have two at twice the price."
"Where's the Primer?......... You'll see! Every three dimensional page, contains a piece of the Primer.'