Big Ben on the FTSE100

Hi walkingman. The v5 rules are:
take the range High-Low between 0800 and 0900 from the FTSE100 SB firm's tick chart:
set orders to buy at H+2pts, sell at L-2:
long stop is H-11, long target is H+13:
short stop is L+11, short target is L-13:
cancel any entry orders not executed by 1300:
close any open positions at or by 1630:
don't trade on any day where the 8-9 Big Ben range is greater than the average BB range over the last 10 days.

I think that's it but of course you need to apply your own money management so that your losing trades are not going to be too great a proportion of your account. These trades are basically r:r of about 1:1 so it's number of winning trades over losers that makes the profit. Feel free to add your own embellishments but please share them on the thread here - I would be only too happy when we one day go to v6 rules!
 
Thanks for that tomorton. I'm new at this game and although I have an SB account I mainly use it to trade the odd share or 2. Breaking even at the moment. Like you guys I'm trying to find a system to day trade the FTSE 100 that might be automated. Never heard of the Big Ben method untill I found this thread. However I have been studying Mark Fisher's ACD method ( think you said that you have a copy of it )for a couple months and your latest version of BB is not that far removed from the adapted ACD method that I have been testing over the past 20 trading days (except 25/2 - technical glitch day). For those not familiar with ACD it's an opening range break out strategy that should work in any market given that it has sufficient volatility and liquidity. It uses the opening range (Fisher suggests 5,10,20 or 30 min opening ranges for day trading) and employs both a points filter and time filter to weed out at least some bad trades. OK, that said, the whole premise of this strategy is that the opening range is statistically significant in that it contains the high or low of the day 20% of the time. So might it not be a good idea to backtest the 5,10,20,30 and 60 minute opening ranges of the FTSE to see which one might be the best one to use instead of just going for a particular time period and seeing how it goes? Shouldn't this increase the odds of getting good results? Also, I think that the use of pivot ranges on some paricular days ,when they are narrow and close to or overlap the opening range and price goes through them,would be profitable in that they allow the use of tighter stops. Enough for now - I'm rambling...
 
Good post walkingman. Big Ben is very similar to ACD, and was an off-shoot of that family of opening range break-out trading, specifically aimed at the 0700-0900 GBP/USD range as the basis for the trade entries. ACD is more sophisiticated, mainly through the uses of the pivot range allowing break-out trades in one direction and playing retracements the other, whether or not the ORBO was a winner.

I have two issues with ACD - I am not convinced that a range can be siginficant when prices have never traded there for any sustained period of time or in any volume - what does that range mean to the rest of the market participants? Nothing. OK, it's a good reference for the trader him/herself to make decisions on so maybe that's good enough. The other issue is a practical and personal one - working full-time I can only set my BB orders, stops and targets, I can't get screen time to check what's happening and identify turning points and entry points etc. for subsequent trades. But if you have got screen time, it would be more than interesting to hear how ACD works on the FTSE100: if I had the screen time I would definitely be using ACD with pivot range straight out of Fisher.

Please do keep us informed.
 
So far, 2:1 up this week, but no trade today owing to wide BB range: would have been a winner long though. I continue to track whether the no-trade decisions due to wide BB ranges introduced in v5 rules are actually worth the trouble, for a month or so.
 
Good morning all. Just a quick video update on how to spot today's trades ( using candlesticks, Fibonacci, channels and trendline and what I am looking for today.


 
It lloks like things are calming down. I have built position sizes back to 2/3 normal.
 
If it helps traders then all is good and cost nothing.



For educational purposes. Here are all three two videos below.


Part 1

Part 2

Part 3
 
Hithere said:
If it helps traders then all is good and cost nothing.
Click to expand...

Why not start your own thread, as it doesn't look like your using the system the OP of this thread uses. So even if your intentions are pure, it's off topic, so it should go in it's own thread.
 
A good week - 3 wins, 1 stopped out, 1 no-trade. Both weeks so far running under v5 rules have been winners.

4-weekly performance is also a bit more encouraging, 9 wins, 6 stopped out, 5 no-trades.

Onwards and upwards.
 
Well, BB trading is looking positive again. The geo-political situation may also be a little more stable than 3 and 4 weeks: Libya probably isn't going to be another Rwanda or Iraq, and ***ushima probably isn't going to be another Chernobyl. But, while I always assume each new rules development will make the system more successful, it would be good to verify this: so how would we be doing with earlier sets of rules?

Over the last 4 weeks, using v5 rules for the last 2 weeks and v4 for the first 2, the system has returned 9 targets hit, 0 expired +ve, 6 stopped out, 0 expired -ve, and 5 no-trades. Giving a positive return of 3 trades.

If we had applied v4 rules throughout (i.e. ignoring the BB range compared with its average), we would be 12-0-8-0-0. Giving a positive return of 4 trades.

Both v4 and v5 have fixed targets and stops, but what if we went back in time and applied the BB range to give target and stop, and ignored the ATR and average BB range? So, if BB was 35.3pts, target would 35.3 ahead of entry and stop 35.3 behind. Results only available for last 3 weeks due to limitations on tick chart displays - 6-0-5-4-0. Not great, definitely making a loss. For a direct comparison, over the last 3 weeks, current rules indicated 5-0-5-0-5, while v4 rules indicated 8-0-7-0-0, both about break-even.

These limited results confirm that v5 rules involve least trades, while v4 and v5 rules take profits earlier, before price can collapse back towards the stop, so encouraging so far, but I will keep monitoring these differet approaches for better confirmation.
 
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