What is a “Grail” Trade?
The term “Holy Grail” was first described in the Street Smarts book. This happens when a market trend is strong enough to result in a 14-period ADX to go above 30. When the price falls back to a 20-period EMA, the odds will be in favor of the newly formed high or low.
What is an “Oops” Trade?
“Oops” is an expression that was first used by Larry Williams. This happens when the opening price gaps are outside of the range of the previous day. A buy or sell action is placed just within the previous day’s range to account for the possibility of the market closing the gap. The trade is left by the close. This pattern doesn’t have any long term prediction value.
What is an “Anti” Setup?
The Anti is similar to a small bull pattern that comes up in the middle of a trading range rather than the trending market which has already broken out. Another way to look at it is like the middle retracement of an A-B-C pattern
What time frames are you focused on?
Our first nightly analysis is usually carried out off the daily and weekly timeframes. In the course of the trading day, we consider the 30, 60, and 120 minute charts together. For the SP’s we also consider the 1, 5 and 15 minute time frames
What are the main pointers you use on your charts?
We use the same pointers regardless of the market or time frame. We make us of the 20 period EMA, a price oscillator and a 14-period ADX. We also make use of an oscillator which is the difference between a 3 and 10 period simple moving average. We also implement a 16 period simple moving average of the 3/10 on top of it. We depend highly on bar charts and have discovered that most traders do better when they can interpret bar charts without the need for indicators based on a derivative of the price.
What is the 20 – period EMA?
Whenever we talk about the EMA, we are referring to a 20-period exponential moving average. This works as a “regression to the mean” in a trending market. It is of little importance in the trading range market.
What is the “Breakout Mode”?
We implement a “breakout” mode strategy whenever the market has gone through any form of range contraction. Any trend day or large range expansion day will always follow periods of range contraction or small daily average ranges. We implement this strategy to try to align with the market flow rather than a counter trend strategy
How do you measure market breadth, put call ratio, and volume?
Market breadth is tracked by observing the number of advancing issue less the number of declining issues. Put call data is made available by the exchanges. We consider the equity only put call ratios added to the put call ratios that include the index option volume.