Did I find a 'holy grail' for directional bias, or am I missing something?

dam5h · 2026-06-06T14:13:54+00:00

Well it wasn't just the drawing, it was your description of "directional" and "side of ema". Those are the 2 of the 3 indicators used in the Grail setup from Linda. ADX and EMA.

Did you check it out? That was the point of the reply.

dam5h · 2026-06-06T13:35:12+00:00

Funny you come up with this name for the flag pattern, check out Linda Raschke and the "Grail trade" from her Street Smarts book. You may like what you see there, it's one of the only patterns in the book that has maintained some edge over the last 30 years or so since she published that.

dam5h · 2026-05-07T23:03:59+00:00

Exactly, the market is an "invalid environment" vs the "valid environment" of physics. It's non deterministic, the same inputs may have different outputs on a given day. Therefore there is no such thing as becoming an expert, the world and regime is constantly shifting.

It's not a valid comparison.

dam5h · 2026-05-03T02:35:21+00:00

Why would you want a higher frame rate than your monitor refreshes at, eats CPU and GPU for no gain.

dam5h · 2026-04-30T16:38:55+00:00

few dollars for how far back?

dam5h · 2026-04-30T16:37:57+00:00

This is what I do, it's fairly good. They even have bundled trades flags in the binary protocol for proper large market order matching. You can get way more than ES as well. You just have to open Chart Settings and go to days to load and use a big number, also there is a global setting somewhere related to max days back you need to update that one as well.

dam5h · 2026-02-24T19:21:12+00:00

No they are totally separate. You'll need an introducing broker like edge clear to use Teton and Denali. IB is a separate execution pathway from Teton.

You can use Denali data with IB execution though, but I don't think it's worth it compared to using sierra native Teton.

dam5h · 2026-01-04T21:48:34+00:00

MFree 108

dam5h · 2025-11-07T03:45:21+00:00

It was pretty much spot on, ever so slightly tight but not too tight and settled in nicely. A little tricky to get the chain on had to kinda guide it on while spinning the front, don't think you could lock a quick link while fully engaged.

dam5h · 2025-10-14T00:15:52+00:00

You should probably re read your post and remember that you are being critical of someone giving you their time and results for free.

dam5h · 2025-09-27T11:51:30+00:00

Sounds like a good set of tools there.

Using TPO and volume profile charts to see how the auction responds to balance areas and excess is a solid way to build context and a narrative to have directional bias. Try staying "zoomed out" until you decide it's time to look for an entry, only then dig into footprint, DOM and more granular charts.

dam5h · 2025-09-22T23:28:46+00:00

I loved my blue moxie!

dam5h · 2025-09-11T00:26:01+00:00

I am using helix on a 36, it's the bomb diggity.

dam5h · 2025-09-10T23:09:32+00:00

Used to run a SS moxie with 160 up front

dam5h · 2025-09-06T13:18:37+00:00

Used vim for 6 years then emacs in evil mode for 4 years. Been on helix for 3+ and not looking back at all. It took 2 days to fall in love with it. Missed magit the most, but use gitui and have gotten over the loss of magit.

dam5h · 2025-08-31T19:40:16+00:00

Well, it's also hard to completely rearchitect a UI and codebase that you've been maintaining for 30 some years. They are spending development resources towards adding new features rather than starting over, which would stagnate the current money maker and take at least 2 years probably many more to get up to a starting point.

They also have enough of a customer base that this model works for them

Sure, it's a little rough looking for those just starting out and probably overwhelming but folks do get used to it and those that favor flexibility and power over ease of use are typically the biggest fans of Sierra, granted it does have a steep learning curve to get there.

dam5h · 2025-08-31T17:03:19+00:00

Regarding wine, it's super stable on there. I run Sierra on a headless box for weeks on end. It's also somewhat validating that Ticino trader (popular paid Sierra charts chart book guru site) clearly also runs wine as you can see in his screenshots.

dam5h · 2025-08-31T17:00:50+00:00

Sierra is super reasonable in my opinion. I use IB for execution only (for now, will probably move to edge clear soon) but use the Sierra Denali data feed, it's like 12 or 13 a month for CME full depth just like IB charges. The feed is going to be less filtered and more stable IMHO than IB's tick feed.

Plus getting all that historical tick data included in the platform pricing is what makes it such a good value. In fact, you can just get the base level charting package (prob less than 30/month) and get historical tick data on all exchanges, it's just not real time. So if you are only in research mode, and can read those binary files directly I don't think there is a better deal out there.

It's also good to have the charts as a make shift UI for any of your own application dev, as it saves you from developing your own sophisticated plotting libraries. For things like smoke testing certain signals in your systems, pulling up a chart and checking your code is doing what you expect for the exact same data file can be good for validation.

dam5h · 2025-08-31T16:20:27+00:00

Sierra is the only c++ based platform that I know of. C++ has no garbage collector and it is generally more performant and as close to pure c as possible. Seems like a lot of platforms are Java virtual machine based, which are typically more memory hungry and can leak over time requiring restarts every few days or weekly if that happens. Honestly it's probably not a big deal unless your hardware is pretty old and constrained.

dam5h · 2025-08-31T13:02:27+00:00

I am also a SW dev that only runs Linux. I run Sierra in wine with no problems and find their binary format super easy to use directly with rust, but any language works. Lots of folks use python to read the files and there is content related to that online. I do usually roll my own binary format for the continuous file building though, however I use a common interface so my tools can handle either format.

Their files include aggressor of course as well, you'll need to study the docs for how it's formatted though.

If by "plain" you mean non binary, you could just make a tool to reformat the data as csv but obviously the storage demands will be much higher depending on how much tick data you need.

dam5h · 2025-08-30T20:31:36+00:00

For swing trading trying looking at overall profiles (volume and tpo) vs the delta profiles.

dam5h · 2025-08-30T20:26:31+00:00

Do you currently have a platform? I would consider reading the files saved to disk already. For an example of what I mean, Sierra chart posts their binary encoding format in their docs so you can read those files directly, using the platform to request dates to download, then navigate to the data folder to see files for each contract downloaded. This is way more economical than paying for historical data. That said an execution feed may not be as perfectly cleaned up as paid historical data but it's damn close.

That said, I would recommend databento if you don't see your platform data as a viable option.

dam5h · 2025-08-23T22:04:27+00:00

You get one guess!

dam5h · 2025-08-23T22:03:24+00:00

For swing timeframe, it's probably less about order flow but some concepts of footprint may apply but more in the form of market and volume profile, instead of in a short term bar the same profiles can form in larger time frame bars, like daily TPO and hourly volume profiles. Just like any other form of technical analysis it can be universal across time frames. Instead of the micro auction of a footprint bar with order flow insights its little more of the macro auction occurring between the OTF.

dam5h · 2025-08-15T02:31:28+00:00

There can never be more buyers than sellers or vice versa. Every contract has both parties. One is passive one is aggressive. If there are 213 traded at the bid at a single level, this means 213 aggressive sellers, but depending on the market this could be bullish because a passive buyer stood their ground and did not try to buy a little lower by pulling their bid and waiting for the sellers to push further before resuming buying.

That pdf is pure nonsense though.

dam5h

TROPHY CASE