ADAPT BACK

Hello and welcome to my blog.

Sometimes you have to throw a lot of stuff out.

After my side trip into NinjaTrader I have returned to MetaStock. Lured by the bright lights of the city it was easy to be distracted. I admit NinjaTrader is very cool and I will continue to use it but only as a back up reference. The recent experience with NinjaTrader had me looking at more and more entry signal systems. This was not the direction I had intended. The original intention was a move towards a large degree of risk management versus finding the perfect entry signal indicator. In the usual roundabout way I found my way back to the original intent.

While reading some of the forum posts at NinjaTrader the book, "Trading With Confluence" by Michael Toma was mentioned. Risk management all the way apparently. I plan to buy it in the near future. So while digging around on the net for information on this book I came across a program called, "JBL Risk Manager". This is an add-on for MetaStock and I have been looking at the free trial for the last couple of days. In one of those odd twists they use ATR as the basis of their risk management. There is a great deal more and the site link is: http://www.paconsulting.net.au/Share-Trading-Investing-FX/jbl-risk-manager/

The program seems a tad pricey and I am weighing the alternatives. Buy the program or spend hours and hours and hours building an EXCEL spreadsheet. Already I know the answer is to purchase the program. Right now I will drive the 14 day trial around the block.

Quick list of what the program does taken from their web site.

- Position Sizing or how many shares to trade, done automatically - Stop Placement calculated automatically - Stop Loss and Trailing Stop exit price - Integrates with your updated MetaStock data service daily - Share Trading Diary/Journal for each trade - Long and Short Trades allowed for with independent performance reporting - Technical Stop entry is available in place of the automatic Trailing / Profit Stop - Maximum % Risk per Trade correctly takes into account brokerage charges - Limits over trading by optimizing your Trading Capital and timing - Multiple portfolios, Currency entry & Exchanges - Pivot Points automatically calculated and updated daily, for short term analysis and trend bias - Portfolio/Trade Performance - Average $Win and $Loss updated daily - Portfolio/Trade %Win and %Loss Ratio updated daily - Easily view all your Open and/or print Closed Trades/Positions - Show Cumulative Profit/Loss and Available Cash - Average Trading period for each Portfolio and trading days of each trade - Average $Rate of Return - Trade Expectancy - Total Brokerage charges for all closed trades - Stock Split adjustment process, very simple when required - Compare Portfolio Performance against any Index or security, easily

Even though this program will do a lot of heavy lifting I am still left with finding the candidates on my own. Back to the world of finding a reasonable entry system. The preliminary methods are to scan for stocks that have moved from below to above the lower ATR band. This seems to be more of a pay attention signal and the results can be placed on a watch list. The other scan is for stocks that have moved above the 6 day ATR with a multiplier of 1.5. Exits are based on a move back below this ATR or possible support areas if they seem more reasonable. There will still remain a great deal of arbitrary decisions when culling the scanned lists but the JBLRM can be used to check the monetary risk and whether it is reasonable or not to enter the trade.

The entry signal scans are still a work in progress but the ATR lower band and the ATR 1.5 seem to be the direction I will be heading. I hope to work out the details later today and perhaps post a couple of charts.

Thank you for your time.