Oct

22

Confirmation, from Jim Sogi

October 22, 2013 |

Confirmation of a trade signal can be helpful to avoid drawdowns. Many small gains,and several large losses tend to be a pattern when using normal expectations in a non normal market. It's the 5+ sigma moves that cause big losses when working in a 2-3 sigma model.

Nison in Candlestick charting methods describes Japanese rice traders waiting for confirmation of a trade signal as the next day shows the reversal or continuation of the signal. This avoids the falling knife syndrome. Larry Williams wrote about confirmation of patterns either as completion of the pattern or as confirmation. The later entry is not as good a earlier entry, but avoids the multiple sigma losses, which may be worth it overall. It would be a worthy exercise to examine and test this. Recent doji reversal signal with narrow range off 1650 after long decline and multiday drop was confirmed the next day is an example of the candlestick idea of confirmation.

Anatoly Veltman writes: 

On Candlesticks: weekly Candles have vastly more meaning. Daily are now meaningless due to seamless Sun thru Fri action. Intraday are totally ridiculous because they vary with arbitrary choice of 5 or 10 or 15 or 30 or 60min period.

Confirmation is a tough dilemma, which may border on trend-following vs. contrarian dilemma.

Gary Rogan writes: 

"Dilemma" isn't strong enough in this case: it's like saying that the market will go up tomorrow for sure unless it goes down. At least Larry Williams developed incorporating multiple time frames into the calculation, but by itself confirmation seems like it can't possibly be meaningful considering the ever-changing cycles: a trend that can be "confirmed" in a statistically significant way using the same methodology over the years seems as likely as a unicorn.


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