The Indicator Store: PM_EMA Strategy for NinjaTrader

Saturday, January 19, 2013

PM_EMA Strategy for NinjaTrader - Setup Review

Hello everyone !
It has been a long time since the last post we made about this setup, so we are going to explain it to the maximum detail and show how to trade it with its TIS_EMA_Indicator and the Strategy PM_EMA_Trader.

This is a Trend Following Setup, so it works better with trending Markets.
It can be optimized for Impulsive Markets, but it will not perform in its best way. There are other Setups focused to Impulsive Markets ( See Impulse Setup ).

In terms of simplicity and easy to use this is one of the most easy and simple setups to follow and we only need to focus on 2 ( two ) Indicators :

An Exponential Moving Average ( EMA )
An Envelope ( Fixed number of ticks above and below the EMA )

The Exponential Moving Average (EMA) defines the trend and also is the entry ;
...when price is above the EMA, we want to go Long at its price
...when price is below the EMA, we want to go Short at its price

The logic is that the price will bounce near the moving average, several times, until the trend is over.... ( more about this later...)

Now we need to define when we are trade ready, and this is where we use the envelope.
While price is inside the envelope, we can consider the market is in sideways mode. So, no signals, no trades...

When price touches the upper band of the envelope, the setup changes to BUY Mode.
When price touches the lower band of the envelope, the setup changes to SELL Mode.

Some examples on the following charts :

This example starts with bars inside the envelope, so the setup is in neutral mode.
When bar touches upper band, the Buy Mode Start and we start looking for an entry at the moving average

Similar example for Short Signal :

On this example price start from inside the envelope ( bars are gray ) until the low of one bar touches the lower envelope and the Setup switches to Sell Mode.
At this point we start looking to short the moving average.
We get several entries ; each time price touches the lower band the bars turn red and the setup sets to Sell mode again.

What happens when the trend is over ...?

Lets look at the following example ;

We can see on the last Short of this chart, that price continued going against the trade touching the upside band triggering the Buy Mode.
If our stop is big enough to survive this move, when the price comes back to allow the long entry we can unload the short entry at a minimal loss.
This behavior is very frequent on trending markets.

There are several ways to trade this setup, we can use a small stop, slightly lower than the envelope size, so we have a standard size loser at the end of the trend. The advantage is that those losers will be always equal and small.
Or we can use a big stop, usually twice the size of the envelope, resulting in a final average loser small but with some big losers.

Detail of the reversal procedure :

On these example charts we are using the Indicator for Ninjatrader TIS_EMA_Trader_Indicator with which we can indicate the period of the moving average and the size of the envelope and it will paint bars according to the trade setup.

With this trade setup automated, like the PM_EMA_Trader Strategy, we can