<< QUESTION >>

Hi Roger,

I recently purchased a year lease for the Asymmetric gold indicator. I could not get the trading game to run due to my java security but I am working on that. My question is I am planning to use your indicator to trade bonds(ZB). I have a relatively small account and do not want to stay in trades overnight. I have a breakout strategy I want to use but have not figured out how to program it into NinjaTrader yet. My question is and correct me if I am wrong; but is the Asymmetric gold indicator an indicator that can pinpoint a breakout? To me it seems like a parabolic indicator that detects change in direction or trend. Do you have an indicator that is considered a breakout indicator?


<< ANSWER >>

Thank you for your question.

There are two types of people in this World: Those who tell you what you want to hear, and those who tell it straight, I prefer to tell it straight.

1. First of all it might be more practical to decide what you will trade by the balance on your account. Trading futures contracts without an account big enough to handle a string of ten or so losses tends to lead to using over restrictive tight stops to compensate and this does not have much chance of working well.
Instead you could consider buying or selling 1 or more share(s) of a stock which is under $50 a share and then trade correctly as per the best settings found in back testing your Percent Asymmetric strategy ( and holding overnight ). This way the losses will be so small and you will be relaxed about holding overnight.

2. Closing out trades before the close is known as day trading and this is not generally a profitable method as there is not enough time for a trade to run into a big profit and plenty enough time to spend on the costs of trading including the bid-ask spread, broker commissions, data feeds, indicators, computers and your time. ( The cost to profit ratio is terrible as large profits can only be had from being left for a long time and costs are the same )

3. The Trading IQ Game runs in Mozilla with Java set to medium security. Currently it is being re programmed in html5 which will work in all browsers and the new version will be released around March or April 2016.

4. Yes it works in a similar manner to Parabolic Sar but with the bonus of being asymmetric and is trend following with its own build in stop and reverse lines. It will only pinpoint a local breakout based on the percentage input you specify.

5. I have made many break out indicators which trade on the break outs of narrow range type patterns. As the best break outs tend to come from multi-month or multi year set ups they are easily seen by the eye and don't require indicators to find them.

You have one good solid indicator to use and a big list of stocks in the instrument manager and a fine NinjaTrader platform with which to perform back tests to find what combination of stocks, time frames and percentages works best. Try starting at 4% and working up and down in 0.25 steps.

Choosing markets because they make money in back testing and fit your account size is surely a better path to take than choosing ZB for no logical reason.

This article explains why day traders generally lose ( approx 90% of them)
http://www.precisiontradingsystems.com/DayTrading.htm

This article shows the best method to find a trading system sweet spot for profitable consistent trading.
http://www.precisiontradingsystems.com/How_to_test_trading_system.htm

I hope this points you in the right direction.