Wut

Hello! How can I help you with "The Geek Forum"? If you have specific questions or topics you'd like to discuss related to geek culture, technology, or anything else, feel free to let me know!

LOL, I know what you mean about not letting it go. I've been getting Business Week for over 20 years now. Gotta have it!

Yeah, good call on Pop Science. They occasionally have articles about actual physics stuff and experiments though.

I grew up on Popular Science, so hard to let it go, although I buy my father subs to Discover every year for Fathers Day

I like Discover, but never was a big fan of Popular Science. I used to get it and thought that it should be called "Popular Gadgets" LOL. It seemed to just feature a lot of new tech toys like cars, boats, planes, etc. rather than much science. Scientific American is really good though. They've probably had a few articles about the LHC debate in there.

Well, when you're talking about something that may have world-ending consequences I think it is important to have the debate.

The trouble I think is that all the top physicists were probably working to some degree on the LHC, so they have a biased opinion.

We didn't have an opportunity to chime in on the a-bomb, otherwise I'm sure there would be the same feeling of uneasiness. The level of math and probabilities is too much for most to comprehend, but I'd like to see a debate between the two sides.

I've always wondered, since the particles are traveling at near the speed of light, how does their mass change relative to their speed. If mass increases relative to speed... Do the protons or whatever they're sending around the thing act as a wave instead of a particle?

Interesting stuff to say the least. Discover and popular science are my two favorite magazines.

Well, showing 100% that something WON'T happen is a pretty high bar. Even with the first A-bomb, they weren't sure that it wouldn't set the atmosphere on fire around the globe.

Yes, iHubbers might be a good source of a few players. The game takes almost no screen time; it's constructed to be kind of slow moving and long term. I've been thinking of recruiting people who like to play "Diplomacy" by mail and things like that, LOL.

Yeah the LHC piece was unexpected. I still don't believe we ought to turn the thing on until we can know 100% that it won't cause a black hole, stranglet or other world destroying particle/phenomenon.

I think you may have some luck recruiting Ihubbers. Anyone that spends the majority of their day on the computer, trading, etc that doesn't have to worry about breaking corporate rules would make a good recruit IMO.

Our unit got RIFed and I left the reserves just before becoming an O3, so I guess I'll always be LT Scott, LOL.

Yeah, I figured I'd use the LHC buzz that was going on in the summer to make that video. There isn't much action in the game yet though; I'll eventually try to recruit some small groups to just play amongst themselves (so the real money issues isn't so scary). Maybe I can get a FOREX traders group going to play LOL.

Hey Cap,

Yeah that's me with the bull dorado. My rank is a long story. My DOR is being changed to May of '06 so I would've been promotable in May of this year, however due to my chain of command wrongly denying my promotion (they didn't think I was eligible and refused to promote me) I wasn't pinned with 1LT until Feb of 2008. Yeah. It's being fixed but it takes forever.

I watched the intro video to your online game. I thought it was interesting.

Hi Matt!

Hey, when are you going to change your nic to "CPT_MATT?" LOL

No riches yet; still searching for a method that works for me.

Don seems to be doing well. He's living the life I envisioned when I first came to Memphis for truck driving school. Unfortunately, I suck at driving a big rig so my adventures on the road will have to wait until I'm making more $$$ trading.

Is that you with the fish?

BLAST FROM THE PAST

How's it goin Cap? You rollin in the riches yet? I met Don (ataglance) a few weeks ago as he stopped in the north metro on his route.

He is doing very well trading FOREX it seems.

Thanks! I've kept this room open for casual conversation but I'm normally found in the FOREX Traders room now.

I heard folks say you did not have many visitors, so I'm visiting some less frequented sites.
:)
David

Hello! Somebody decided to visit this dusty room after all?

The dancing siggy characters liven it up a bit...

hi

Everything's over on the blog now. I sometimes post in the FOREX forum here on iHub too.

Good luck with that. I look forward to hearing your results.

Whaddaya mean???

I WAS one of the extremists on the politics board, LOL!

Too busy maintaining the website to spend the time over there. Getting back into FOREX trading on my demo account now.

LOL!

Miss you antagonizing the extremists on the politics board

never mind, got the link
being a blonde today!!!!!!!!!

There's a FOREX trade posted on the blog.

No Further Updates

I am now consolidating all discussion of site news, FOREX research, FOREX trading tools, and my own FOREX trading experiences in one single blog. Here is where it will be:

http://market-geeks.com/tradingblog/

I'm hoping this will be a lot less confusing than having a "News Archives" page on the site (which also will be no longer updated), a discussion forum here, a journal of trading experiences at "Cap's Trading Diary" etc...

I'm consolidating all that stuff in one place.

I will keep this board open mainly for historical purposes and will continue to monitor it.

It can also serve as a kind of contingency discussion area in case someone wants to discuss something in more depth. This forum allows a more freestyle discussion than a blog format does.

That's all for now. Come visit the blog. Turn the lights out in here if you're the last to leave. Thanks!

Cap

Dagnab it!!! Right after I posted that, I lost the internet connection for the rest of the night. So assuming it doesn't go down AGAIN tonight, I'll be going live with the blog a little later on. Yeesh.

I'm about to find out!

I'm about to replace this board with an onsite blog which will open later tonight. I will use the blog for news and so forth, but its main purpose will be to record trades that I do which are based on Market-geek.com research and/or trading tools on the site. The only trading tool on the site right now is PBM, so that's what I'll be using at first to trade FOREX.

I haven't been trading in my practice account lately because I've been doing a bunch of promotional work for the site.

So for the dozen or so people who follow this board, I will be moving the discussion elsewhere as of tonight. Stay tuned for the announcement.

I will still post on "Cap's Trading Diary" here at iHub, but that's mainly just a general discussion/chit chat board now.

Is PBM helping you trade your FOREX training account?

Oops, now I remember something that I had wanted to post.

For anyone who has gone through the class on how to read the Price Behavior Maps, I made some slight changes in the past couple of days. Basically I changed how the color coding works on the detailed version of the map to make it more sensible.

Not much new to report... just doing some promotional stuff. Continuing to post the Price Behavior Maps each weekend.

An interesting note: As of yesterday, when I go to Yahoo Search and type in "problems with technical analysis" in quotes, Market-geeks.com comes up in the #1 spot! Woo hoooo!! LOL

The Price Behavior Map is updated as of this weekend. The free map on the site is generated from the most recent 250 daily price bars, so it doesn't change much from week to week.

The MACD in relation to the zero line is still showing as being significant across several currency pairs. However, the most significant indicator on the map now is %R crossovers.

The Swiss Franc is the most striking example:

Periods in which the 5-day %R was below the 20-day %R lasted for a median duration of 5 days, and the median price change during those periods was -79 pips. Periods in which the 5-day %R was above the 20-day %R lasted for a median duration of 7 days and the median price change during those periods was +114 pips.

The indicator has worked in a similar fashion with all the other pairs except AUD/USD, but the differences in pip movements were not as large.

I've updated the short-term Price Behavior Map too, and have started to keep track of the total scores from the summary version from week to week. This will give a historical record of how consistently each indicator performs from week to week. Since these maps are based on a week's worth of 10-minute price bars, there is no overlap in the data from week to week like there is with the free long-term map posted on the site. Thus, any correlation between one week's performance and the next is not due to the same data being used for both weeks. Each week has absolutely fresh data.

I did a scatterplot of the last two weeks worth of short-term totals for the 17 indicators, and the correlation from one week to the next was pretty high. For you statisticians out there, the R-squared value was about 0.61. I'll be tracking this from week to week, but this first test was very encouraging!

In the last post, which was at the end of July, I talked about using the research from the last project on TA conditions along with the CAT scanner spreadsheet to create a new tool in the site's Trading Operations Center. I'm happy to report that this is now complete!

The new tool is called a Price Behavior Map, and its purpose is basically to keep track of which TA indicators are currently working well and which ones aren't.

The Trading Operations Center is now re-opened and I have begun a list of trading tools on that page. The first (and currently ONLY) tool on the list is the Price Behavior Map. Click on the link and it brings you to the current version of a map geared toward longer term FOREX traders. Here's a direct link:

http://market-geeks.com/map.php

There is also a class on how to read a Price Behavior Map in the Geek Academy. Here's that direct link:

http://market-geeks.com/academy/research/pbm/pbm.php

Short term FOREX traders can subscribe to a weekly email which will include a Price Behavior Map geared toward them, as it is based on the 10-minute bars for the entire previous week. Here's a link to do that:

http://market-geeks.com/products.php#pbm

More coming soon!

Cap

The project on technical analysis conditions is finished and I have moved it into the Lab Archives:

http://www.market-geeks.com/labarchives.php

As a result of this project, I now have a nice little research tool that I'm calling the Conditional Analysis Test Scanner (or CAT Scan for short...cute huh? LOL).

Anyway, this is a tool on MS Excel which, given a set of TA conditions such as "RSI > 80 and rising, 20-bar moving average below 50-bar moving average" or whatever, tests that set of conditions to see if there is any statistically significant change in price behavior during periods when those conditions are met. The CAT Scanner is set up to run this standard statistical hypothesis test 21 times using 3 time-frames for each of 7 FOREX currency pairs.

It takes anywhere from 30 seconds to a few minutes for me to code in the TA conditions, depending on how complex they are. Really complex conditions are not a good idea anyway for a lot of reasons. At any rate, it then takes me about a minute to run the 21 tests using macros I have set up. This provides a set of 12 "scoring values" which give an indication of how price behaves when the given TA conditions are met as opposed to when they are not. So I can test several sets of conditions in under an hour. There are concrete examples of this entire process in the project notes.

One benefit of this tool is that it's great for generating ideas for trading setups and other strategy ideas that wouldn't have otherwise occurred to me. For example, I was running routine tests of how price behaves when price crosses a moving average, and I ended up with a method for knowing when I could use stops that are much tighter than usual. This example and others are all documented in the notes.

A theory that I talk about in one of the Geek Academy classes has to do with how the effectiveness of different TA indicators might change continually over time:

http://www.market-geeks.com/academy/research/frontiers/frontiers1.php#paradigm

I think the CAT scanner (as primitive as it is) may help enable us to watch those changes and keep on top of them. I could periodically run scans of a set of popular TA conditions and see which ones are still working well and which ones don't seem to be very valuable currently. I think I'll set something like that up in the Trading Operations Center, since there's no tools or anything there right now. I'll put the next research project off for now while I work on that.

Out for now...

Cap

The research project on TA conditions is still going on in the Lab. I have created a tool on Excel for quick analysis of price behaviors under a specific set of TA conditions and I have been using it to investigate moving averages and Williams Percentage Range. I wanted to look at a trend following indicator and a contrarian indicator, so I chose the simplest ones.

After several fits and starts, I'm figuring out how to use the "Conditional Analysis Testing" Scan (or CAT Scan) to provide some interesting results. I've gotten to the point in the research project now where I'll be investigating some specific questions that came up while I was trying to figure out how to use the new tool correctly. Here's a list.

1. From pg. 14: Why are OB/OS periods more reduced in duration for shorter time-frame charts?

2. From pg. 15: Is the relative position of two %R indicators correlated to total price change during the period?

3. From pg. 15: Do moving averages act as support and resistance?

4. From pg. 19: Do price bar penetrations of the moving average intensify moves in the same direction as the penetration?

5. From pg. 19: Does total price change actually move inversely to the direction of a moving average crossover?

6. From pg. 21: How can the maximum rise be less positive while the total change is more positive for OS periods and the maximum decline be less negative while the total change is more negative for OB periods?

The entire project can be seen by opening up the MS Word document called "Current Research Notes" at the bottom of the Market Laboratory page on the site.

http://www.market-geeks.com/lab.php

Cap

Hi Susie,

I noticed that!! I was quite startled that you didn't look startled today... :0)

I lost my startled Susie gif.

If you see it, will you let me know?

I'm starting the research project on technical analysis conditions now. The purpose of the project is to set up a tool to test whether or not price behaves differently under some TA conditions (one moving average being above another, or sloping in a certain direction for example) than others, and whether that difference in behavior is significant or due only to chance.

This is like "take two" for that last project in the Lab Archives, which had a glaring flaw in the experimental design.

Whew! I finally got all the ads up on the site. They actually add some much needed color to most of the pages. Yahoo webhosting was verrrrryyyy slowwwwwww for a period of about a week, making the task take a lot longer than I anticipated, but they seem to be back up to speed now.

Now it's finally back to doing research in the Market Lab! :0)

There is yet another project on the PRL. I haven't been working on the research lately though because I've been plastering ads up on the site.

Also, here's an interesting discovery. While I was putting Amazon.com ads up in the Geek Academy, I found a book called "Evidence Based Technical Analysis". The author has a very similar philosophy on TA and is also an advocate of doing rigorous scientific testing of indicators. When different people come up with very similar ideas at about the same time, that often indicates that an idea's time has come...

I've added another project to the General Research section in the Pending Research List. This one has to do with creating a contrarian mechanical algorithm for a FOREX currency pair similar to the system called Automatic Investment Management (AIM) created by Robert Lichello in the 70's for stocks.

Here's a link to the PRL:

http://www.market-geeks.com/labpending.php

I moved the notes from the last project into the Lab Archives and updated the Lab and Pending Research List.

I'll be updating the current research document with Results, Analysis and Conclusions tonight, but here's a preview.

The basic conclusion is going to be that this experimental design was flawed in a way that radically increases the probability of "type-2 errors" or "false negatives".

The problem is in the way I set up the signal group and control group in each set of price bars. The signal group was composed of every bar at which the signal was present, and the control group consisted of every other bar. This is not the right way to proceed because much of the control group is still affected by the signal. Many of the bars in the control group would have occurred right after a signal. Therefore, if the signal really is correlated with a certain price behavior, then the price behavior would be occurring in the vicinity of many of the control bars as well, just because the control bars are near the signal bar.

For example, suppose a positive MA crossover really is correlated with a subsequent uptrend in price. A bar at which a crossover occurred is part of the signal group, and the next few bars would be part of the control group. If the price rises because of the correlation with the signal, that price rise is occurring right after these control bars as well. So when we calculate the mean price rise associated with control bars, the value will be skewed upward. In effect, it would look like price rises are VERY COMMON, and so the price rise associated with the signal bar is no big deal. This isn't true though. If the control bars hadn't been tainted by their proximity to the signal, price rises wouldn't look nearly as common, and the price rise associated with our signal might very well look like a big deal.

I think the solution to this design flaw will lie in combining the ideas of chart "events" and "conditions" in one testing project instead of treating them in two separate projects as is currently shown on the Pending Project List.

As an example, once a moving average crossover EVENT occurs, we have a CONDITION on the chart where price is greater than the MA (or whatever). There is a unique set of bars for which this condition is true, and that set of bars is bounded by two events; the positive crossover at the beginning and a negative crossover at the end. Our signal group and control group should consist of these separate sets of bars.

Once I finish the Results, Analysis and Conclusions for this present project and move it over to the archives, I'll begin work on this modified approach.

Gotta get to work...

There's another project added to the Pending Research List. This one looks at chart CONDITIONS as opposed to chart EVENTS like the one I'm working on now. These projects are creating quite a list of research tools:

Bar Pattern Analysis (BPA)
Technical Event & Signal Testing (TEST)
Conditional Analysis Testing (CAT)

All with quite geeky acronyms I might add! LOL

I'll need to create short classes on each of these tools in the Geek Academy as I create them.

I've added some more projects to the Pending Research List, and divided the list up into a "General" section and a "BPA" section. All the BPA projects are pushed back down the list in favor of the general projects. BPA is kind of low priority in the ol' Market Lab these days, LOL.

It's a lot less complicated than stocks because there isn't nearly as much to keep track of. Here's a good beginner's site about FOREX:

http://www.babypips.com/

Market-geeks.com is mainly for research into price behavior and I'm starting some of that now in the Market Lab. I may start updating Cap's Trading Diary with my experiences in learning to trade FOREX though.

Sounds complicated to me. Will you report the results of your foray into New Zealand currency on your site? If so, I'll watch for it.

Well the exchange rates bounce around a lot, but they're a lot more "trendy" than stocks. Also, no one can really manipulate the rates, not even the central banks. The FOREX market is just too huge. There's almost TWO TRILLION dollars a DAY that gets traded in FOREX I think.

The European finance ministers just came out today and said they all want the Euro to stay below $1.30, and their central banks are probably going to try to keep it down there, but ultimately the market is going to go where it wants to. No one group can screw with it.

I'm short the New Zealand dollar in my demo account right now, but I'm just sort of exploring the platform and developing a feel the market before I open a live account again.

Methinks you may be right, Cap. Them nasty peeps on Wall Street been mean to me the last two days and are beginning to scare me too! ;)

Are you sure FOREX won't do the same?

I have added three new research projects to the front of the line in the Pending Research List. These three projects push the BPA stuff back for now. Here's a link to the list:

http://www.market-geeks.com/labpending.php

In the lab, I have started work on the first project. There is a link to a Microsoft Word document which shows the daily research notes. Here's a link to the Lab:

http://www.market-geeks.com/lab.php

Not at all! The equity markets are like a dark alley where thugs are lurking and waiting to mug me and con artists are constantly trying to empty my pockets. That dark alley is scary!! I'm leaving it for the nice clean, bright upscale neighborhood of FOREX.

:0)

I am leaving the equity markets behind completely, and will concentrate exclusively on the FOREX markets.

You are a brave soul.

Good Luck! ;)