The Handy Chart has been improved with new indicators for "Go Long", "Go Short", and "Exit Trade" as shown. Furthermore, there are pop-up alerts for each signal.
The trade method has also been improved in two ways.
- Time of day (by 30-minute increment).
- Most efficient exit target.
The optimum exit targets were calculated by taking the maximum potential of each trade, and optimizing against that. For example, with the 3.75 target in place, all trades where the maximum potential exceeded 3.75, exited at 3.75. Many trades reached higher than 3.75 (some exceeded +10!) but then ended exiting below 3.75 or, in some cases, for a loss.
The sweet spots from both analyses - time filter on and off - corroborate each other.
Note: Optimizing based on past history is no guarantee for the future. One way to stay in tune is to keep a "running average" of the best trading times and sweet spots, and keep updating them as you trade. It is also useful to "bracket" optimized results, or at least to confirm them. For example, in the above chart, although 3.75 is the optimum exit target, both 3.5 and 4.0 were quite close as well. That gives confidence to the 3.75 number. On the other hand, if the 3.75 stuck out as being far too "efficient", then there would be a good chance that the data was tainted by a few extreme trades.
Time of day is particularly fickle. Any method that loses money overall (by trading it throughout the day) is likely to run into losing periods even with time filters applied. On the other hand, a method that is robust enough to be profitable - or at least not losing - across all time periods, is likely to improve when time filters are applied.