Hey gang,

Don't know if this sounds too far-fetched or not but...

Imagine if you could plot single ticks on a line chart, then train an algo to recognize the patterns at that low a level... Something along the lines of voice-recognition... You wouldn't be able to trade it all unless you had ultra-low spreads and commissions, but you would certainly see the paying moves coming.

Weird, but potentially wonderful.

I think it's still up for debate -- whether or not tick-level analysis is even a worthy endeavor. That may sound contrary to the typical trading buzz... but you have to consider the tradeoffs.

More trades is usually desirable because it (can potentially) lead to more wins. But there are tradeoffs in processing, quality of patterns vs noise, and execution constraints. I'm not convinced that it's a good game to try to play if you aren't a bank, for example.

If you could make the same rate of profit with a slower look at the market information, then it's easier. Easier to analyze, better quality patterns and easier to execute.

Small fry traders also have an advantage over banks and large institutional players in that we can move much more swiftly, usually even under-the-radar.

Hey Dusktrader,

It would take a hell of a lot of preparation for processing, for sure, but I think it would help get into the big movers sooner.

Having been stuck with mt4 for a couple of years, I've been looking for trend methods that can be used on any timeframe, so that I can get into a trend on the lowest viable timeframe, then, once they have some profit locked in, holding their stops back until the next timeframe up can take over the management.

Most trades will get their stops hit, but you'll get the odd few that will sneak past the retracements, and end up sitting on the weekly or monthly chart's management list.

The TMF functions in Zorro can enable us to do that sort of thing now, but still, I'd like to have the option of eradicating the time factor, and just concentrate on the waves.

I agree with everything you said, and that would certainly be a great bot if you build it!

But, I would argue that at some low level (say below 5 minutes), it no longer makes sense to try to trade that.

so just set it up so that it only activates above 5 minutes

Oh, I'll build it eventually... I just have to learn how to use Zorro decently first, then learn how to code from scratch... I've only done a bit of CPE coding in mql4, so I've got a fair bit of frack to bunt thinking to undo first, though

Dusktrader: I've been following your coding and testing threads, so that should make things much easier, thanks

I'd like to add our vote to the push for easier price based strrategies in Zorro.

You guys on the Zorro team seem unconvinced that price-based trading will add to the profitability of users, so have given Renko lower priority.

But like acidburn, we've been playing with Renko and P&F and finding it works very well to filter out the noise caused by time. As acidburn points out, it's not time movements that make profits, but price movements. The time dimension often simply obscures this.

In our tests, indicators and signal processing often work much better on Renko charts, and for building price action algos Renko bar patterns are much clearer and easier to define in code in comparison to candles.

Good features for price-based and volume-based bars, charting and reporting would help differentiate Zorro from the many mid market and even quant level platforms that seem to handle this badly.

For building accurate forex Renko histories, Dukascopy offer pretty clean tick-level price histories for free. They can be accessed easily with the free Tickstory utility.