Jem's Uber Basket Trading Thread

[xrismak]

SWG123,
You guys wait until Baluda, Steve Hopwood,Jemook and Neotrader read this thread, they will come up with an Idea that might even be better than yours by a million yards.... these folks are kind of Pretty hard to comprehend and keeping up with them is like trying to chase after a thorough Bred Racehorse on foot....

wingate, this is brilliant! We are trading the *basket* -- the sum of profits of all pairs. To date we've only had Baluda's iExposure, Tickets "what is the P/L for each pair now" indi. But this approach lets us see the equity curve of the entire basket!!

I would modify the indi to take "long pairs" and "short pairs," and to calculate & sum up the #pips open profit in all pairs. That would be an exact analogue for what the NB basket systems use. In fact, now that I think of it, we might not even have to mess with offline charts! I'm not certain but it might be possible to write an indi that does the above -- sum up the open profits for each of the basket pairs -- and plots that in history. I think that would be a fabulous tool for understanding the basket behavior!

Of course, if you calculate only the open trade profit, you couldn't use it as an entry signal like you are. Hm. Maybe just summing up the prices is the right idea. That would definitely be do-able in an indi, without offline charts. By summing them together you hide the behavior of individual pairs, so you reduce your ability to cherry-pick the best pairs to enter -- but really, with this basket approach, the assumption is that they're all going to run together anyway. Seeing a total-basket equity like that would make it really easy to see when the basket as a whole has its pullback and resumes the trend. I like it!!

EDIT: I bet you could even adapt Baluda's SlopeValues code to select out the pairs >X and <-X and have the indi automatically plot the "equity curve" for all the right pairs.......

Sounds like the way to go to me

[The_Snowman]

Before this offline basket mania gets to far, too fast, I just don't really see the value of it.

I mean, we have to go back to the normal charts to trade anyway, we have a monitoring system already in place, what does the basket really give us?

What if 1 of the pairs has not set off the entry trigger as per the rules? Will we trade it just because the offline basket says so?

Offline charts can be a pain, and with that special indicator to combine all pairs, only being able to watch the BUY or the SELL pairs with one Empty4 and having to run another for the opposite trades, way too much hassle for me.

Perhaps you can improve on the system / method but for me it doesn't get any simpler - eg.

1. Find the eligible trending pairs, use Daily charts & Slope Values, check M.P.

2. Find the retracement on 4 H charts, check W.P.

3. Find the entry points on 1 H charts (for me D.P.)

Manage trade as required.

Easiest way to learn and watch pure Price Action that I have seen, good luck.

[Thunder123]

Before this offline basket mania gets to far, too fast, I just don't really see the value of it.

I mean, we have to go back to the normal charts to trade anyway, we have a monitoring system already in place, what does the basket really give us?

What if 1 of the pairs has not set off the entry trigger as per the rules? Will we trade it just because the offline basket says so?

Offline charts can be a pain, and with that special indicator to combine all pairs, only being able to watch the BUY or the SELL pairs with one Empty4 and having to run another for the opposite trades, way too much hassle for me.

Perhaps you can improve on the system / method but for me it doesn't get any simpler - eg.

1. Find the eligible trending pairs, use Daily charts & Slope Values, check M.P.

2. Find the retracement on 4 H charts, check W.P.

3. Find the entry points on 1 H charts (for me D.P.)

Manage trade as required.

Easiest way to learn and watch pure Price Action that I have seen, good luck.

Agreed. System is simple, with anymore simplification we will lose valuable information needed to make decisions. We need to check each pair to see S/R/Ps, currency strength etc.

At this point, I am just going to focus on trading baskets as Jem described, and I suggest every here do the same. I find it hard to constantly change the system, because I end up learning nothing (just end up wasting my time adding diff indicators etc)

From next week I will post my trades here and make a fxbook account so we can learn from each other.

[RockyJ]

Before this offline basket mania gets to far, too fast, I just don't really see the value of it.

I mean, we have to go back to the normal charts to trade anyway, we have a monitoring system already in place, what does the basket really give us?

What if 1 of the pairs has not set off the entry trigger as per the rules? Will we trade it just because the offline basket says so?

Offline charts can be a pain, and with that special indicator to combine all pairs, only being able to watch the BUY or the SELL pairs with one Empty4 and having to run another for the opposite trades, way too much hassle for me.

Perhaps you can improve on the system / method but for me it doesn't get any simpler - eg.

1. Find the eligible trending pairs, use Daily charts & Slope Values, check M.P.

2. Find the retracement on 4 H charts, check W.P.

3. Find the entry points on 1 H charts (for me D.P.)

Manage trade as required.

Easiest way to learn and watch pure Price Action that I have seen, good luck.

One thing I have learned over several years is there are as many ways to approach trading as there is people. What one person sees as plain as day may be Greek to a non Greek.. The smallest seemingly insignificant piece of the puzzle is at times all it takes to make everything click for a person.
If what you are doing now works for you that is great. I have had some success with this approach as well as have many others obviously. It is a very promising method for sure.
I also see a value in what is being discussed. We are discussing a perspective and what we might gain from looking at information in a slightly different way, that is all, it is actually not changing anything simply displaying some of the information in a slightly different format. Kinda like when Baluda went from SlopeValues v1.0.3 to SlopeValues v1.0.4. Personally that small change made life much better imo. Same info just displayed a little differently.. but it works better for me...

Gary seemed fairly confident that accomplishing this without the offline charts is highly probable, which would be really nice. Of course there is nothing stopping anyone from looking at individual charts prior to placing a basket order, I mean who wouldn't do that ? I certainty do.
I will be looking forward to see what develops out of this as I believe there may be benefits to it. And if not , so what, I'll continue trading the method as it is now.

[kelisa]

The off line chart setup is just a variation to the original NBShellJem basket. There is nothing wrong with it. In fact, its healthy to keep exploring possibilities. There will be endless variation to the system, but it all boils down to the traders' trading style.

As for me, I will still follow the original rules by bob and jem's filter. H4 on complete retracement, back reentry to 5.1, I take trades, min, over 0.6, 0.8 sure to go ahead and hold. TP when ATP reached 40-50pips(pretty average for these pairs).

As for this coming week, I will experiment with longer trades. Ie, I will try to hold trades as long as till Friday. Once trade is executed, I will switch to D1 to monitor price, if price retrace above 5.1 on D1, I might consider closing trade. So, these open pairs will be BE+1 on end of Day 1 and we'll see then.

[Jemook]

If you'd like to try something new just let me know on this thread when you enter your basket according to your changes and I'll let you know if I think it's a matching/good setup based on my rules.

[Bunker]

As for this coming week, I will experiment with longer trades. Ie, I will try to hold trades as long as till Friday. Once trade is executed, I will switch to D1 to monitor price, if price retrace above 5.1 on D1, I might consider closing trade. So, these open pairs will be BE+1 on end of Day 1 and we'll see then.

Kelisa,

I really like to “longer trades” approach with the D1 monitoring. I am really interested in your findings. Thanks!

About the offline chart, I think a lot was already said on that topic but I’ll just add one comment. I’m a big fan of finding ways to improve strategies so “bravo wingate” for this idea. It generated a lot of interest. My only concern about this approach is the following:

Jem’s rule #3: Wait for the triggers to start kicking in on most of the chosen pairs.

So when I see simultaneous actions happening on most of the pairs, it provides me with a strong level of confidence in my trades. Like Jem says on p1: Timing is absolutely essential with this strategy.

Now, I’m not sure how that part will show on a single chart. What happen to that single chart when only 1 or 2 pairs out of (let’s say) 8 pairs suddenly go crazy ? This happened a few times in the last 2 weeks. Looking at a single chart, are we going to know that the action is created by a minority of pairs ?.

This will be interesting to see.

Cheers!

Bunker

[kelisa]

Bunker - Lets see how the D1 monitoring goes...

About the 8 pairs going haywired when trading the OFFLINE chart, that can happen, but also, because these 8 pairs are already filtered by the SlopeValues, they are already trending one direction.

On the other hand, any sudden deviation can be expected too. That's why Shelly recommended to trade so many pairs in both directions on a basket to diversify the risk.

[garyfritz]

Yes, if you average everything together into a basket, you can't see the individual pair behavior. One solution to that is to still watch the individual pairs for entry signal.

But on the other hand, the whole idea of this approach is that these pairs are correlated and tend to move together. So if the basket as a whole starts moving, won't the laggards usually catch up?

This strategy trades the basket. We use the open equity of the basket to trigger TP and SL -- NOT the open equity of individual pairs. So in my mind it just makes sense to watch the behavior of the basket open equity to help manage the trade. If the basket equity has a pullback and starts moving positively, then it seems like you'd be less likely to hit the basket SL -- regardless of how individual pairs are behaving.

We've been working all along to try to get a feel for good TP / SL / BE / JS / etc levels, and that was hard to do with a whole basket. Viewing the basket equity is exactly how we can get a better feel for that.

[Bunker]

Yes, if you average everything together into a basket, you can't see the individual pair behavior. One solution to that is to still watch the individual pairs for entry signal.

But on the other hand, the whole idea of this approach is that these pairs are correlated and tend to move together. So if the basket as a whole starts moving, won't the laggards usually catch up?

This strategy trades the basket. We use the open equity of the basket to trigger TP and SL -- NOT the open equity of individual pairs. So in my mind it just makes sense to watch the behavior of the basket open equity to help manage the trade. If the basket equity has a pullback and starts moving positively, then it seems like you'd be less likely to hit the basket SL -- regardless of how individual pairs are behaving.

We've been working all along to try to get a feel for good TP / SL / BE / JS / etc levels, and that was hard to do with a whole basket. Viewing the basket equity is exactly how we can get a better feel for that.

My concern was more about the trigger timing. I am wondering if 2 pairs suddenly going wild while the 6 others remain quiet could be mistakenly interpreted as a signal to trade when looking at a single chart. But like you said, by comparing both, the one chart basket and the individual pairs, we'll probably find out.