That's the one where up trend and down trend bar colours are different, isn't it? (I have Delta but not the member systems, although 'TCI system' seems to work and the little dots appear on the chart the 'TCI' doesn't <g>).
Errr.... to be honest, Mk11 eyeball is far better than any system/bit of code I've found yet... any particular reason you want it? There are lots of trend systems you can use - ADX for example, or simple MA crossover systems to name 2....
Dave
Errr.... to be honest, Mk11 eyeball is far better than any system/bit of code I've found yet... any particular reason you want it? There are lots of trend systems you can use - ADX for example, or simple MA crossover systems to name 2....
Dave
Sorry, not silly -
Delta is an idea that Welles-Wilder bought into and now sells. Without giving too much away a chap persuaded W-W that markets repeat their behaviour on a regular basis, so for example you can take a chart of the Dow 30 and pick out highs and lows, then work out the dates when those highs and lows will repeat. You could pick out a pattern of these reversals in trend for a sector and find that the sector components repeated the sector pattern, ie you find the dates for the tops and bottoms in the chip sector and a year from now you have a good idea of when AMD will peak.
This is held to be true for all markets and a variety of timeframes - timeframes run from intraday moves ("stand by, INTC is going to peak at 2pm" sort of thing) to very long term - as I recall the Dow is part way through the second repeat of a cycle that lasts a century or so... picka share, sector, or entire market and then combine it with a timeframe of hours, to days, to weeks, months...decades......
It's easy to convince yourself it works - many top/bottom forecast turns occur on the money - you can't be sure that the move is obvious at the time, and profitability may depend on spotting the entry and exit when neither is obvious when the money is on the table. I could provide Dow, SP500 (this is US oriented, although with effort you could make it UK friendly) charts where even the most cynical would have to admit the turns were uncannily accurate considering they were forecast months or years in advance. However - consider this.....
Look at a bar/candle chart, see how obvious it is where the tops and bottoms are? Now look at the last bar - is it a top or a bottom or neither? AFTER the event you find the turn was forecast within maybe 3-4 days, or even spot on... but you don't know that at the time the top/bottom actually occurs. In reality TA isn't about finding entry.exit signals, it is about extracting the profit from those that pan out whilst swiftly exiting those that don't - the buy/sell signal is almost inconsequential.
Delta costs about £200, a bit less, for the book that describes it all. To actually trade the signals you really need the software because it's a complete pain otherwise - I program trading software, I wrote a 'Delta' program, and I can't be bothered to do all the work involved to reproduce it. For a non-programmer trust me, you'l buy the software if you buy into the idea.
The software costs a few $k, this does not give you intraday signals - longer timeframes yes. Intraday info is for 'directors' only, which (last special offer) was about $10k as I recall. For EoD traders intraday is immaterial, and for what it's worth I consider the medium term info more use anyway - I'm ignoring the shorter term info that is 'longer term than the intraday info'.
If you buy the software you then pay a couple of hundred bucks a year to stay turned on - the software turns itself off when it times out. TCI and a few other 'extras' cost on top of the rental. Delta is not cheap.
The inventor (?) has, since flogging it to W-W, produced a new version - based on tide tables I think. You can buy that instead - Jim Sloman is his name.
Final take: There is substance in it, but it is difficult to turn what is undoubtedly a good turn point predictor into a profitable system - the guy writing the official newsletter has trouble persuading me he is in profit, in fact his 'closed trades' record sucks. If the guy responsible for drumming up interest can't make a profit..... Secondly you can't help but wonder, as with most systems, how the seller isn't just trading it and spending the other 38 working hours a week burying the profits under the roses. I consider Delta to be another step on my personal road to knowing everything - I long since decided that perfect knowledge doesn't equal profit, so I pursue profit and knowledge seperately these daya - one for interest, the other for the Netjets subs.
As a bonus, if you buy the book "The Delta Phenomenon" you get a free copy of Welles-Wilder's book on amassing wealth, that tells you to trade what you know and rely on compound interest, it does this over more pages than you can shake a stick at in a cringingly badly written style that assumes (I guess) monkeys have learned to read, here's the book for them... it is DIRE, as one reviewer once wrote "this is not a book to be put aside lightly, it should be thrown with great force". I've donated mine to the local charity shop, had I written it I would even now be scratching my gold embossed name from the spine....
Dave
Delta is an idea that Welles-Wilder bought into and now sells. Without giving too much away a chap persuaded W-W that markets repeat their behaviour on a regular basis, so for example you can take a chart of the Dow 30 and pick out highs and lows, then work out the dates when those highs and lows will repeat. You could pick out a pattern of these reversals in trend for a sector and find that the sector components repeated the sector pattern, ie you find the dates for the tops and bottoms in the chip sector and a year from now you have a good idea of when AMD will peak.
This is held to be true for all markets and a variety of timeframes - timeframes run from intraday moves ("stand by, INTC is going to peak at 2pm" sort of thing) to very long term - as I recall the Dow is part way through the second repeat of a cycle that lasts a century or so... picka share, sector, or entire market and then combine it with a timeframe of hours, to days, to weeks, months...decades......
It's easy to convince yourself it works - many top/bottom forecast turns occur on the money - you can't be sure that the move is obvious at the time, and profitability may depend on spotting the entry and exit when neither is obvious when the money is on the table. I could provide Dow, SP500 (this is US oriented, although with effort you could make it UK friendly) charts where even the most cynical would have to admit the turns were uncannily accurate considering they were forecast months or years in advance. However - consider this.....
Look at a bar/candle chart, see how obvious it is where the tops and bottoms are? Now look at the last bar - is it a top or a bottom or neither? AFTER the event you find the turn was forecast within maybe 3-4 days, or even spot on... but you don't know that at the time the top/bottom actually occurs. In reality TA isn't about finding entry.exit signals, it is about extracting the profit from those that pan out whilst swiftly exiting those that don't - the buy/sell signal is almost inconsequential.
Delta costs about £200, a bit less, for the book that describes it all. To actually trade the signals you really need the software because it's a complete pain otherwise - I program trading software, I wrote a 'Delta' program, and I can't be bothered to do all the work involved to reproduce it. For a non-programmer trust me, you'l buy the software if you buy into the idea.
The software costs a few $k, this does not give you intraday signals - longer timeframes yes. Intraday info is for 'directors' only, which (last special offer) was about $10k as I recall. For EoD traders intraday is immaterial, and for what it's worth I consider the medium term info more use anyway - I'm ignoring the shorter term info that is 'longer term than the intraday info'.
If you buy the software you then pay a couple of hundred bucks a year to stay turned on - the software turns itself off when it times out. TCI and a few other 'extras' cost on top of the rental. Delta is not cheap.
The inventor (?) has, since flogging it to W-W, produced a new version - based on tide tables I think. You can buy that instead - Jim Sloman is his name.
Final take: There is substance in it, but it is difficult to turn what is undoubtedly a good turn point predictor into a profitable system - the guy writing the official newsletter has trouble persuading me he is in profit, in fact his 'closed trades' record sucks. If the guy responsible for drumming up interest can't make a profit..... Secondly you can't help but wonder, as with most systems, how the seller isn't just trading it and spending the other 38 working hours a week burying the profits under the roses. I consider Delta to be another step on my personal road to knowing everything - I long since decided that perfect knowledge doesn't equal profit, so I pursue profit and knowledge seperately these daya - one for interest, the other for the Netjets subs.
As a bonus, if you buy the book "The Delta Phenomenon" you get a free copy of Welles-Wilder's book on amassing wealth, that tells you to trade what you know and rely on compound interest, it does this over more pages than you can shake a stick at in a cringingly badly written style that assumes (I guess) monkeys have learned to read, here's the book for them... it is DIRE, as one reviewer once wrote "this is not a book to be put aside lightly, it should be thrown with great force". I've donated mine to the local charity shop, had I written it I would even now be scratching my gold embossed name from the spine....
Dave
trendie
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Thanks Dave.
I am getting thorugh so much info these days, that I forgot I have actually been to the web-site !!
Thanks for the synopsis.
Yes, it is an interesting idea. But when I heard that they can predict the peaks etc years into the future, the idea that popped into my head was "astrology" - I thought they would use planetary configurations etc to do this !!
I cannot think of anything else that would make someone think they can pinpopint key points THAT far ahead.
I did -
- download a few ephemeri (?) - and did notice a Mars effect, such that there was a reversal everytime Mars crossed into a new Zodiac sign.
However, I think, for the time being, I will stick to MAs and Fibs.
I am getting thorugh so much info these days, that I forgot I have actually been to the web-site !!
Thanks for the synopsis.
Yes, it is an interesting idea. But when I heard that they can predict the peaks etc years into the future, the idea that popped into my head was "astrology" - I thought they would use planetary configurations etc to do this !!
I cannot think of anything else that would make someone think they can pinpopint key points THAT far ahead.
I did -
- download a few ephemeri (?) - and did notice a Mars effect, such that there was a reversal everytime Mars crossed into a new Zodiac sign. However, I think, for the time being, I will stick to MAs and Fibs.
TheBramble
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Dave, that is the most lucid and comprehensive summary I have ever seen on Delta. As a fellow Delta Gamma Phi, I concur. A most useful and interesting diversion down tangent lane and all grist to the mill. I'd recommend everyone to it. I'm glad I bought he book, enthused over manually working out a few sectors and finally bought the software - but I didn't renew my first year's subscription.
The guy who used to edit the monthly DSI newsletter (John Kruder) seemed like a good sort, who may have just given up in dismay. Even he was beginning to doubt the 'streeeetch' he was having to put into interpreting inversions and 'well maybe the MTD we called in last month's newsletter wasn't really the MTD after all'.
All in all, it was fun. It didn't add to my bottom line, but it did to my store of knowledge and in providing invaluable mental and real-world connections.
"this is not a book to be put aside lightly, it should be thrown with great force". ...goes into my quote book.
The guy who used to edit the monthly DSI newsletter (John Kruder) seemed like a good sort, who may have just given up in dismay. Even he was beginning to doubt the 'streeeetch' he was having to put into interpreting inversions and 'well maybe the MTD we called in last month's newsletter wasn't really the MTD after all'.
All in all, it was fun. It didn't add to my bottom line, but it did to my store of knowledge and in providing invaluable mental and real-world connections.
"this is not a book to be put aside lightly, it should be thrown with great force". ...goes into my quote book.
Cheers guys,
as Tony is (I hope <g>) aware I put a huge amount of study in - being a Physicist I KNOW many of the factors that will cause random events to appear predictable, and predictable events to appear random - but all that effort has resulted in a gradual, almost glacial improvement in my trading ability. (I even stop to study whether I'm over thinking the problem, so to speak). John Kuder is no longer doing the newsletters incidentally. It remains one of the 'best proved' items in my bag of tricks, so you can draw your own conclusions from the fact that I am currently looking at a range of ideas that basically hinge around simply finding a trend and riding it.
I'm convinced that many Delta types believe in it, including W-W himself in all likelihood - I'm equally convinced it is not a complete system/tactic, it requires significant extra input to make a consistent profit from it - there are simpler systems around.
MTD inversions etc - oddly enough this doesn't worry me that much. I figure that if you see an early peak/dip at pt 1 the sensible investor would assume it's a good time to take profit and exit - wait for the next pt 1 when the inversion, if any, has played out. What I found harder to accept is that there is a complete ban on inversions that don't occur within the bracket around pt1... I'm positive these do occur, and making the chart fit the preconception is a bad idea... better just accept that occasionally these occur outside the expected window.
Making the chart fit the rules is not a good idea, much of the humming and harring concerns this, in my view.
Dave
as Tony is (I hope <g>) aware I put a huge amount of study in - being a Physicist I KNOW many of the factors that will cause random events to appear predictable, and predictable events to appear random - but all that effort has resulted in a gradual, almost glacial improvement in my trading ability. (I even stop to study whether I'm over thinking the problem, so to speak). John Kuder is no longer doing the newsletters incidentally. It remains one of the 'best proved' items in my bag of tricks, so you can draw your own conclusions from the fact that I am currently looking at a range of ideas that basically hinge around simply finding a trend and riding it.
I'm convinced that many Delta types believe in it, including W-W himself in all likelihood - I'm equally convinced it is not a complete system/tactic, it requires significant extra input to make a consistent profit from it - there are simpler systems around.
MTD inversions etc - oddly enough this doesn't worry me that much. I figure that if you see an early peak/dip at pt 1 the sensible investor would assume it's a good time to take profit and exit - wait for the next pt 1 when the inversion, if any, has played out. What I found harder to accept is that there is a complete ban on inversions that don't occur within the bracket around pt1... I'm positive these do occur, and making the chart fit the preconception is a bad idea... better just accept that occasionally these occur outside the expected window.
Making the chart fit the rules is not a good idea, much of the humming and harring concerns this, in my view.
Dave
Thank you
Thanks to all for the great replies on my Delta post--very informative one and all. I do use ADX (recommened by one) and a couple of other MetaStock, self-styled trend indicators in trading the Nasdaq. At the moment I'm several days into a 40 day free trial of Delta Graphics (the Delta software program). About a year ago, after reading Wilder's book on Delta, I followed Delta pivot points for the Nasdaq over a number of months in a simple MetaStock program. My overall impressions are much like those of my fellow travelers down the Delta pathway. However, I have found Wilder's TCI indicator to be quite useful, which, incidentally, I weigh along side Wilder's considerable contribution to technical analysis generally. Delta Graphics is EOD only, and I would be interested in observing the TCI in MetaStock RT.
Thanks to all for the great replies on my Delta post--very informative one and all. I do use ADX (recommened by one) and a couple of other MetaStock, self-styled trend indicators in trading the Nasdaq. At the moment I'm several days into a 40 day free trial of Delta Graphics (the Delta software program). About a year ago, after reading Wilder's book on Delta, I followed Delta pivot points for the Nasdaq over a number of months in a simple MetaStock program. My overall impressions are much like those of my fellow travelers down the Delta pathway. However, I have found Wilder's TCI indicator to be quite useful, which, incidentally, I weigh along side Wilder's considerable contribution to technical analysis generally. Delta Graphics is EOD only, and I would be interested in observing the TCI in MetaStock RT.
I would also like to say thanks to everyone who contributed to this discussion. I'm reading "The Delta Phenomenon" right now and since this has been around for several years I was very curious to know if people were able to turn it into a profitable system. A former Delta member here wasn't too impressed with it either: Delta Phenomenon - Page 4 - MoneyTec Traders Community Forum
Mike
Mike
Dave rises from the grave to reply to a thread...cue sound of creaking hinges....
Jim Sloman seemed to be so impressed with Delta that he invented his own offshoot, which I'd imagine him describing as perhaps 'how to take the Delta phenomenon and make it profitable' (the Delta people, last time I looked, seemed unable to actually pick profitable entry/exit more consitently than blind chance would manage). Yes, this is harsh - it's also true in my honest opinion.
I doubt Jim S has managed it either.
I bet, in fact, that for any given system or method around 80-100% of users fail with it. The other 0-20% make it work to varying degreees, some very successfully, they then can't figure out why the rest of us lose money using it.
I have yet to see a method that gives unambiguous entry and exit and makes a profit - this would be a mechanical system, with no ambiguity in entry/exit you could program a computer to trade it, and I am aware that the Nirvana/Omnitrader lot are determined to reach this goal (I am equally aware of all the sales literature they send me that shows the software was so good last time that they've produced a new version for my current perusal - tell you what, I'll buy the version that was so good it didn't need any changes). I am also aware that the chap who started Omnitrader etc still seems to run a software company to actually make a living, rather than simply getting his program to pull off one amazing coup a year.
Face it folks, there are no short cuts worth talking about.
I remain convinced that the real key to profit is twofold - learning to see what a price chart shows you, and/or learning to spot the fundamentals of a good investment...in its simplest form is the P/E sensible? These two methods lead to trading over different timescales for the most part.
Oh, and this is a bad time to buy property - but we're heading into a very good time to buy it indeed!
Dave
Jim Sloman seemed to be so impressed with Delta that he invented his own offshoot, which I'd imagine him describing as perhaps 'how to take the Delta phenomenon and make it profitable' (the Delta people, last time I looked, seemed unable to actually pick profitable entry/exit more consitently than blind chance would manage). Yes, this is harsh - it's also true in my honest opinion.
I doubt Jim S has managed it either.
I bet, in fact, that for any given system or method around 80-100% of users fail with it. The other 0-20% make it work to varying degreees, some very successfully, they then can't figure out why the rest of us lose money using it.
I have yet to see a method that gives unambiguous entry and exit and makes a profit - this would be a mechanical system, with no ambiguity in entry/exit you could program a computer to trade it, and I am aware that the Nirvana/Omnitrader lot are determined to reach this goal (I am equally aware of all the sales literature they send me that shows the software was so good last time that they've produced a new version for my current perusal - tell you what, I'll buy the version that was so good it didn't need any changes). I am also aware that the chap who started Omnitrader etc still seems to run a software company to actually make a living, rather than simply getting his program to pull off one amazing coup a year.
Face it folks, there are no short cuts worth talking about.
I remain convinced that the real key to profit is twofold - learning to see what a price chart shows you, and/or learning to spot the fundamentals of a good investment...in its simplest form is the P/E sensible? These two methods lead to trading over different timescales for the most part.
Oh, and this is a bad time to buy property - but we're heading into a very good time to buy it indeed!
Dave