Mark, your point is well taken. It is also called experience. Our brains are wired to recognize patterns, and if you look at your computer screen long enough, as in your case, you develop kind of a sixth sense, a sense of déjà vue all over again.

Discretional trading is dead. If someone win money in this way is a hero, a supernatural man/woman.

My experience in algo trading for retailers I could give many advices, but both most important are: use your "automated robot" like a coffee machine, get "n" cups of coffee a day (and no in the same time), not working all day. Stopping robot is tough to follow statistics, so you must review your statistic model.

Money Management should be close to the curve of successful trades. Easy example: model with 90% successful trades, it is improbably to have 2 consecutive bad. When one is bad we should increase investment

Work in Short term = scalping is the best way

Good Luck

no one the planet earth is a more fervent advocate of automated trading than i am. systems i have programmed will make money long after i am gone. but i have denied opening pandora's box long ago - escaped was the fact i can easily out trade any algo with the exception of intra-bank hft arbitrage. without anything but a quote screen i can trade like a machine, i have known this for years and never embraced it until now.

like Guy said it is purely experience and i am not tooting my horn just saying that it is a new frontier of research possibilities to replicate and automate that ability. that is how i got in the game in the first place i was hired by a discretionary trader to automate his intuitive style. i never thought i would have the ice water in my veins like he did. it took over thirty years to embrace that fact i have evolved to the point i could throw the old crutches away and run with my own legs to the next improved mode of transportation. mark

Mark, this is going full circle. Over the years, program after program you were able to evaluate and test what worked and what didn't. It took a lot of time to finally design above average profitable trading systems. Then a lot more to improve upon them and make them more robust, meaning that they could last.

But now, having gone full circle, you can extract those same trading rules, add your experience, and trade discretionarily, at leisure, like you've never done before. All this with the added confidence that you know what you are doing and why. Bravo. Good trading. All my best.

Any recommendations on thorough stock screening programs? I am interested in screening equity fundamentals and market data based on closing data, not intraday.

@Mark H. Start with a well defined strategy first. Then screen stocks for the required parameters of that strategy. Having a screener without a strategy is like having a cart without a horse. If you already know specifically which fundamental data you need to implement your strategy, and can't locate a screener for it, then hire a programmer or program it yourself. There are several data vendors available which provide an API to render fundamental data.

@Mark Brown,

Would you please contact me? I've been reading the tape for over 6 years / 7 hrs a day. I'd like to talk about what you posted.

Regards,

Adrian

Interesting....I've been trading short term(seconds to 30 mins) discretionary for 10+ years mostly because I never could accept the fact that an algo would take trades that I would never consider based on my experience. Then 3 years ago I jumped on the algo bandwagon ...a lot of research went into micro structure and time sensitive execution.It's much tougher than I initially expected.While I cannot get an algo to behave as I do by coding every nuance with respect to considering "context" trade by trade , I still had to move into automation because I can only short term trade 1 or 2 markets simultaneously.The markets are getting faster in the sense that there are more moves that appear to come out of no where, giving a short term discretionary trader less time to assess and react.You'll often hear retail traders blame "the bots".

If you had an algo that could net 50 to 100 ticks per contract per week on Crude, Gold and Corn...would you automate or stay discretionary?

@Daniel, if you have that, automate it, trade it for a year and retire