xard777 wrote: Wed Feb 05, 2020 10:58 am
In a nutshell - we want to trade from 30 min Red Semafor to 30 min Green Semafor to 30 min Red Semafor Ad Infinitum.
However, our Semafors have a tendency to recalc so a way around this is to use the 2nd White Dot to confirm the possibility that the current Semafor will no longer recalc and we can therefore make our trade to the next Green/Red Semafor with impunity. The problem that exists is that the 2nd White Dot can also recalc, it may not even turn up on the 1min chart and sometimes not even on the 5min chart and sometimes not even on the 15 min chart. That's sometimes, in most cases it will appear on one or two TFs below the 30 min and allow us to commit a trade towards the next Semafor on the 30 min TF (Woohoo kerching).
I got temporarily bogged down looking for a retracement of the 2nd White Dot towards the 61% and 78% zone level and missed out of some golden opportunities. It turns out that the 2nd white Dot can appear at as little as the 30% retracement level and hold the line then reverse and continue on the main trend.
The problem here is if we then enter at this level only to see price retrace back to 61% (or even 99%) can be a lot to swallow on the negative side - a position that none of us want to be in. I am finding that the 5min chart is giving us our best 2nd White Dot from which to trade toward our 30 Min Semafor. Hence, the 30 min & 5 min charts on my trading screen.
Hopefully other traders will see this and perhaps we can have a workaround for any inconsistencies along the way.
All the best
Xard777
PS Here is what the latest setup will look like...
Here we have the 30 Min chart showing 5 min White Dots, 15 min Blue Dots and 30 min Semafor Red Dots (Red Dots will cover up both white & blue Dots on the chart).
The 15 Min blue Dots are same as 5 min white Dots but showing on the 15 min TF - so in theory you are looking for the Highest/Lowest white or blue 2nd Dot from which to trade to the next Red Dot
This way you can simply stay on the 30 min chart at all times and get to trade the smaller TF 2nd Dots (be it 5 min or 15 min).
THIS IS HOW I WOULD TRADE THIS SETUP
Dear Xard,
I. Let me address your intuitively dismissed retracement level idea with some quite strong quantitative confirmation of your decision (not mine, but the author of the course I posted; sorry I remembered it vaguely, but couldn't find it sooner, as it wasn't in the course or the book, but a blogpost):
"In fact, if you take an objective look at retracements, you’ll start to see something interesting. Retracements can “kinda stop anywhere” in the previous swing, but, on average, they retrace “about half, maybe a little more”. In all my years of trading, I haven’t found a more reliable rule than that, and it’s also borne out in quantitative testing."
"This chart shows swing retracements across the horizontal axis. (E.g., 60 means that the swing retraced 60% of the previous swing.) You can see that the peak is somewhere
around 60%, with a very wide margin of error."
In the blogpost (especially below the section 'Buying pullbacks'):
II. XARD: Should we wait for the corrected package, or is it usable (can I set it on 5 mins autorefresh somewhere)?
III. navlem: these dots aren't carved in stone. You shouldn't jump on the gun like a too fast lover, but wait for some kind of confirmation: e.g. candle formation, or at least use a limit order (and not an immediate market order) above (long), or below (short), the entry candle to give chance that it doesn't go immediately against you