I've done a fair amount of research with price movement independent of time, albeit not in an automated trading environment. It was also not with Renko bars, although the concept of Renko is something that I think can accomplish that goal of price/time separation.
It's nice to know that I'm not the only one that is wasting time on these things.
So far I felt pretty lonesome, at least on this forum.
First exotic bar type I played with were constant range bars (I still remember the excitement when I first discovered them), quickly followed by Renko, Median Renko, and finally with these latest one that I don't even know how to call.
I think the concept of merging price and time could be fundamentally flawed, but it is used as a basis for almost all modern trading. Any time you force market price to be attached to a time boundary, you have created an artificial representation that could be misleading, or at least misinterpreted. That is my theory anyway.
And my theory exactly. Whenever I see 100 pips bar, surrounded by tens of 5 pips bars on both sides, I know it was a trading opportunity lost because all that happened on inadequate time scale. And 5 pips bars are better not traded, chop chop. When I try to remedy that by going down on the timescale, I immediately get drowned by sea of randomness, commissions eat all the profits and so on. Basically these discoveries are what fueled my research into exotic bar types so far. Bars now tick at my profit/loss frequency, they're in perfect sync. ATR is constantly constant
etc, etc...
The combination of Renko + Zorro could open a lot of doors. Price is all that really should matter, but due to limitations in most modern trading software, we don't have a good way to visualize the supply/demand independent of the time constraint.
Doors are ajar with the data I provided. Not all is perfect, but chase for an elusive edge is already possible. Because, Zorro like most of other platforms is heavily time based, I guess it's not possible to implement support for timeless bars without a lot of effort. So I can understand that it could take a lot of time and/or lot more interest before it happens.
Speaking of supply/demand, basically we're in the wrong market (forex - no central volume) to be expecting that. We could switch to trading futures, but then some other problems emerge, like less liquidity, bigger capital requirements etc.. Don't know, seen many supply/demand theories, still nothing attracted me to dig deeper. Seems too complicated, no evidence of usefulness, etc... Unfortunately this industry is plagued with con artists, sometimes lots of time is wasted trying to pick sense, where there's none.
