For my money, most people make e-mini trading an exercise in futility, bizarre theory, and interpretation of crazy indicators. Had I started trading outside the halls of an institution I suppose I wouldn't know where to start; this business is fraught with as many crazy ideas as crazy indicators. I don't think it has to be that hard. One of the first principles of trading is that prices tend to move from overbought to oversold and oversold to overbought in a manner that rarely strays from a mean price. You can take advantage of this tendency and profit, though few people actually trade Reversion to the Mean effectively.
Back in my college statistics class, we learned that standard deviation is a measurement that is used to objectively quantify the amount of variation in a given dataset. That definition works pretty well for explaining levels of excessive buying (overbought conditions) and excessive levels of selling (oversold conditions) and can give you an insight into when buying levels have exceeded expectations and sellers are likely to enter the market and vice a versa, when selling levels have exceeded expectations and buyers are likely to enter the market. In e-mini trading, I have been tinkering with this idea for nearly 10 years and defining an optimal Simple Moving Average that best represents an acceptable mean price that is uniquely useful for e-mini scalping. This was not the easiest of things, as e- mini scalping is much shorter in time and market breadth than calculations used in e- mini swing trading. (Where reversion to the mean trading is more common)
Without wandering into a lengthy mathematical explanation of how I have arrived at the numbers that best fit my e-mini scalping style, I can say that for most people and average between 200 and 300 will serve you well. I stick with Simple Moving Averages because an Exponential Moving Average weights the most recent price action in calculating a line plot. This is not a helpful attribute when looking at a 200 period data string and distorts the true mean you are trying to determine.
My standard deviation (SD) settings are higher than I expected, but for my trading style they seem to have worked well over the last 3 to 4 years. I generally use a channel with the inside ring the lowest standard deviation (SD 1.5-2.4) level that will produce a reversion to the mean and the outside ring(SD 2.8-3.5) is generally the extreme point where you can expect a powerful reversion to the mean. With about 4300 trades recorded and charted, I've had a range of results (depending on volatility conditions) that varies from 78% success on the low side and 85% on the high side. Like all things in trading, reversion to the mean is an exercise in probability and market conditions are a prime variable in determining Reversion to the Mean success.
The day got rid of all the goofy indicators and oscillators and learned Reversion to the Mean, order flow, and began to understand price action was an important day in my e-mini trading life.
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