Special shout out to Ray aka Kiwi, from our trading group, for a great trade, well managed. 15R from just one of his trades, in one session, is the sort of trade that many traders can only dream of..  Great stuff Kiwi!

As for me  - well, an erroneous press of an ATM button meant that I was TC'd out too soon, but that's another story. Still, not too shabby for a morning's work but the best was just 11R

As always: the emphasis is always on identifying the strong HTF price magnets, before we even start looking for a trade. ​It's easy to establish the targets and entries, but traders will often struggle with the trade management.  Ray did the perfect job with his trade..

We'll see plenty of examples of great setups, every day, but this, from DOW M15 today, is worth sharing.

It's what we call the 'TLB S Test' but what made it even better was the confluence: 62% retrace in an SR pivot zone. I would ideally like to see three points of confluence for a setup, after first identifying the strongest possible price magnets, and this gem ticked all the boxes.

Sadly, I wasn't watching therefore it is a solid WCS (wouldacouldashoulda).

We could do with some more eyes in our trading group :)

There have been a few emails, asking me how the Bot is going, so thought a quick blog post would be good, in reply.

March, until this week, has been very tricky with the odd NY AM PA and … well you know …  Things turned around this week with a 7% win on Wednesday and 20% yesterday. Not all the testers did so well on Wednesday, due to the differences with broker price feeds, but yesterday was pretty much the same across all the testers (I haven’t been told otherwise, at time of writing).

Here’s yesterday’s trade, reproduced using the Back Tester : ​

A couple of us have Bot attempting the FTMO Challenge - I need about 2% profit to pass.  We've been running with that since October, without failing the max DD etc., but have yet to pass in terms of profit. The Bot has had weekly changes, since we started, is running on a much-reduced %risk per trade, and we switched to using my Trade Copier, a few months back, as we saw better results when copying trades from Pepperstone to FTMO: FTMO spreads can be crazy plus the confluence levels are often very different.   Despite that, I've now passed three FTMO demo challenges. by Bot trading directly on their feed, here's the latest after just four trades, (to be fair, that was very lucky} The terrible consistency score is low due to small number of trades - I'm seeing 92% on the actual challenge.

A big shout out to Peter S, in our trading group - he passed the challenge yesterday, with Bot taking that fantastic trade, and he's only been running with 0.25% risk.
​Well done Peter !!!!

As always, I remain pessimistically optimistic.   December was great, January was ok, February was a DD month for some or a tiny profit for others - very tricky.  If this month closes in profit, I'll be less pessimistic, so fingers crossed 🤞 We are also still seeing different results across the different brokers that we're testing on.  It's very frustrating for me but will look at that in more detail, when time permits.

On a different note and just a reminder: you can follow me on BlueSky since I deleted my Twitter account - I'm posting daily reviews for DAX/DOW/NASD, if you're interested: @snormtrader.bsky.social  Would be nice if I had more than four followers :)

Hope the above answers your questions, to those who have emailed ...

I think Elon Musk has totally lost the plot.  He's screwed around with Twitter and gave it a stupid name.  He's pissed off most of his Tesla customers with his far-right views, His unfathomable interference with European politics and destruction of US government bodies, through DOGE, is just gobsmacking.  Don't even get me started on his recommendation that the USA should leave NATO. or his man-love relationship with the orange idiot or or or ....   What a plonker!!!  

I had much respect and admiration for Musk when I owned my own Tesla Model S, but there's no way I would buy another Tesla.  Similarly, I can't continue to support him as owner of what was once a good social media platform called Twitter. These days it seems to be full of tyrannical despot bots (not the type of bot that I've been working on for a year or so) or idiots that support extremist right-wing politics and world destruction.  

My little gesture of a finger to Musk is to move from Twitter/X onto Bluesky.  I've never posted much nor had a big following but it's a good way for me to share updates or other news, for my small loyal customer base. 

If you'd like to join me on Bluesky, I'm: @snormtrader.bsky.social

If all goes well and I remember to do it, I'll be posting some of the DAX/DOW/NASD pre-market reviews that I do for our trading group. And ... that's another thing ... Skype will be no more come May, much to my dismay, so we'll no longer be the Skype Trading Group but rather the Elements on Matrix Trading Group - doesn't quite have the same ring about it, 

If you're wondering where that image of Musk came from - I  can't take credit for it - you can read about it here: https://www.unilad.com/news/world-news/donald-trump-elon-musk-germany-float-nazi-putin-492104-20250304
I hope they don't mind me using the pic.

ATM and eWH have been updated so they no longer use DLL files and and the licence database has been moved to what we hope will be a more reliable server.

Both can be downloaded from their respective installation pages.

We were chatting about this in our Skype Trading Group this morning. 
​In order of importance ...

• Got a strong price magnet? Tick
• Got a strong PRZ? Tick
• Got a good bar(s) @ PRZ? Tick

Fill your boots!

I asked AI to create a graphic for that - not too bad really :)

Sergio, a very long-time and much-appreciated member of our Skype Group - officially named the eWH Trading Group - went to some trouble to get AI to create this graphic. I thought that deserved a posting for prosperity, so herewith.

The reference to beers is how we refer to profitable trades - rather than talking about money or pips etc we'll often joke that we banked some beers. We've banked plenty this year and the Bot has had a terrific December.

Wishing you all many beers for 2025 :)

We’ve been using the Fair Value Gaps (FVG) for a trading, for many moons now – there’s no doubt about their usefulness for making informed trading decision.   If you don’t know what they are, here’s a quick explanation for you …

For most of the time, when markets are open, there is a balance between buyers and sellers, that is evident from the way price hovers around price levels, as the trades are negotiated.   These areas of ‘balance’ can be quite short or last for an extended period, where price seems range-bound.  Occasionally, you’ll see a big move, with either the bulls or bears being completely dominant, hoovering up the orders so quickly that there doesn’t appear to be any negotiations between them: this is known as an ‘imbalance’.
​
Such imbalances can occur with regular gaps, where there is a distinct difference between the close of one bar and the opening of the next.  You’ll also see them over the bars, and will ideally be looking something like in this example, from EURUSD daily, on the 13th Nov this year.

Bar 1 clearly had buyers and sellers in negotiation – it had a small body and apart from that being a little green, it looked like there were no winners, with the upside and downside rejection wicks.
Bar 2 was a strong bearish momentum bar.  It looked like price just bombed from the open, with few buyers found until the end of the bar.
Bar 3: clearly found buyers with the strong downside rejection but note the high of that bar, in relation to the low of bar 1 – there was no overlap there and so the area between bar 1 low and bar 3 high is referred to as the Fair Value Gap.

Obviously just reverse those three bars for bullish setups.

Price will eventually correct to test that gap – perhaps the low of it, perhaps inside such as the 50% level, or completely close it.  There’s also a chance that price will later flip that FVG to reverse the trend; such PA can be a great way of looking for new impulsive moves in a different direction.
​
Below shows a couple of opportunities where you could have shorted the test of that FVG, the last being at the mid-point (the 50%) with a terrific P5 setup for confluence, and great RR down to the H4 TZ1.

I’ve shared (for free) the FVGs indies, that we use in our Skype Trading Group, in the eWH installation page (the FVG indies only work with eWavesHarmonics).  One version just shows the FVGs for the current timeframe.  The other version references a higher timeframe: we use the M15 timeframe for our M1 trades. They add terrific confluence and can offer a great perspective on what price is doing and where it might be going.  I’ve seen the FVGs work well for doing measured move projections, in the same way that I’d use a regular momentum gap, mid-move.
​
Thanks for all your support in 2024.  Wishing you and yours a wonderful merry Christmas and a most prosperous 2025.

I’ve never managed to get a 50R trade, through manual trading – the best trades have been around 30R.  Having a robot do the entries and management, certainly makes things easier, and removes the human factor in banking too early.

The ‘Bot’ as we call it on the Skype group, is still not finished and doesn’t look like it will be before 2025 – I am just getting too many things to code and test, as each week passes. It’s seemingly never ending and one of the reasons that I’ve been slack with my blog posts and everything else is life.  The trades that the Bot is designed to trade can all be done manually (obviously) using eWavesHarmonics, ABC123 and ATM – I’m trying to make this as close to my own trading as possible although the Bot is more setup-driven, whereas my manual trading is more HTF-target-driven.
​
At time of writing, with 1% risk per trade, the EA is generating over 10,000% profit on a GB £10k a/c in 14 months of back testing; 12,337% profit on a US $10k a/c (the difference is due to the 100-lot size maximum value limit).

Live trading results are very close to the back testing results but due to the number of variables, for all the different market conditions, we’ve yet to realise the true potential in live; I’m quietly confident that we will eventually. The general idea, with the automation, is that Fibonacci-based price patterns repeat themselves -even if they don’t always deliver the same results – so, given enough time, we should see everything repeat at least once.  Indeed, we have already seen numerous occurrences of some setups.

To give you an idea of how the Bot trades, and hopefully some ideas for your own trading, I’ve taken the top 5 trades with over 25% profit (@1% risk per trade) and uploaded them to the Trader Training Course (still free for eWH and ATM licence holders). I’ve explained the logic for entry and exit – all quite basic stuff really, but it’s the simple things that we often overlook as traders. I hope it helps with your trading.

Does more than 10,000% profit in a year sound to good to be true?   Well, you know what they say, but it’s 100% possible in theory and according to the past year of back testing.  I'd love to see another 50R+ this December - I'll let you know if we do.

Before I get into the subject matter, I should really comment on the previous post: what a load of tosh that turned out to be. Instead of seeing the bears run rampant, we saw new all-time highs on DAX and DOW, although the first week of Sept started very bearish.   NASD also made a good gain, after a heavy start, getting back to test the ATH supply, formed back in July.  It just goes to show that you can’t always rely on history repeating itself nor can you rely solely on statistics to accurately predict the future of price action.
​
The subject of statistics is the point of this blog post, once again – I am rather fond of them, despite the September-effect being irrelevant this year.  I’ve always remembered the formula for Spearman’s Rank Coefficient, for some odd reason.  I memorised if for my Statistics ‘A’ level exam, back in the days when Hugh Cornwell was the front man for my all-time favourite band, and was very disappointed to see it presented at the top of the exam paper. There is little else that I remember from my mathematical learning, other than the benefits of statistical analysis I’ve yet to use Spearman’s formula for trading, although have seen reference to it.  Instead, I’ve simply focused on win/loss ratios using the EA that’s been in forward-testing since June.  If, like me, you trade the DOW, from when the NYSE bell rings, you might find these stats to be of interest, or even relate to them from your own trading experiences.

As per previous stats blog post, the EA basically trades Fibonacci retraces, with confluence.  There is seemingly an infinite number of permutations and combinations for the setups.  As each week passes, I find more and code the extra variables, seeking to improve the profits and reduce the drawdown. All the trade history is posted to a CSV file, so - with the help of some pivot tables - I can see what works well and what should be avoided; that applies to the setups and, more recently as I’ve discovered, times. I was hoping to have this EA running nicely without the ‘tweakamisations’ by now but the markets keep throwing their curve balls, so am resigned to the work continuing until year end, if not into next year. 

Anyway, enough waffle and onto the stats. The data below is for a little over one year of EA-trading DOW – mostly back-tested results, although back testing is very close to forward testing, give or take some spread variations that can occur at random times.
  
Best months – bearing in mind that I have some overlap with August and September history: 

January and July top the list with a 32%-win rate.  April was a super month for profit but that had one trade with a 50% gain, so is a tad misleading.  August and September, as we’ve seen from our live trading, have been very tricky months. We had 17 losing trades in a row in Sept: no fun at all.   I’ll need another 4 years of forward-testing to get some real meaningful monthly stats – remind me to share the results in 2028.
​
Best days of the week to trade DOW: -

Thursdays are, without doubt, the best day of the week, followed by Tuesdays.  You might as well take Monday off, although even with a win rate of just 22.11% there was still a profit to be had, from 190 trades.  A return of 257R – or 257% (non-compound) gain if you risk 1% per trade – from just trading on a Thursday is impressive.

Best hour on any day of the week – this is broker time (GMT+2) with the NYSE bell going ding ding at 16:30.  Note that I’ve previously found that 20:00 has a very low win rate, so the EA only takes a trade on the hour, not during it: there have been two such trades.

Apart from 20:00, the lowest chance of success is in the hour after the NYSE opened.  The first half hour generates the best returns but with just a 1 in 4 chance of success; that’s perfectly understandable given the often-seen whipsaw followed by the long duration for which the trade might stay open. The best chance of success is during 21:00 but the returns aren’t so great, due to the limited time left for the trade to stay open: the EA closes any open trades before the markets close and, it’s worth pointing out, will only take one trade during the first 17 minutes after the bell rings.

​If we look at every hour in each day of the week, with focus on there being a reasonable number of trades taken, the stats show that the first half hour of Thursdays is the time to trade, if you can only spare that amount of time in a week. Thursday 19:00 also generates good returns with a 47% win rate, but there’s only a sample of 17 trades for that time. Friday 16:00 is crap, although … law of sods ... this Friday, with that time switched off for the live account EA but not the demo account EA, it did this trade, for over 5R; would have been 7R by sticking with the TP and not activating the trailing trade management.

I’ll not go into all the stats now, but I’ve also gathered additional data for success rates: the day before US holidays (bad) and the actual US holiday (surprisingly good); the days before FOMC (bad) and FOMC day after 18:00 (good); Triple Witching days aren’t so good but better if you wait until after 19:00 (although I only have 5 of those days in my stats); GDP news day – bad when it’s on a Wednesday but good on a Thursday ... and so on ...

These stats are from the EA trading but I believe the times discussed should be relevant for many DOW traders who buy the dips and sell the rallies (basic price action trading, in a nutshell). It might be a different experience for the squiggly line or breakout traders (shudder at the thought).  I’ve found all this to be interesting and the data certainly improves the results for the robot. As with all stats though, they’ll need to be revisited as we get new data. Please drop me an email if your own experiences are completely different.