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One of the most underappreciated ideas in systematic trading is that you do not need great systems as much as you need uncorrelated ones. I want to walk you through a forum thread that illustrates this beautifully. A WealthLab community member named DrKoch, a developer some of you will recognize from his Finantic indicators extensions, implemented all seven trading systems from Laurens Bensdorp’s book Automated Stock Trading Systems and combined them into a single Meta Strategy. The thread is here, and I would encourage you to read it in full: Laurens Bensdorp’s Automated Stock Trading Systems - WealthLab Discussion What makes this worth your time is not just the systems themselves, but what happens when you put them together and what the correlation matrix reveals about why it works. The Seven SystemsBensdorp’s seven systems each target a distinct market condition. DrKoch implemented all of them with full production grade architecture including liquidity filters, differentiator conditions, setups, entries, ranking logic, and a complete exit suite. Here’s the lineup:
These include long and short positions as well as trend and mean reversion across calm and volatile markets. Each system is deliberately built to behave differently from the others, which is the differentiator condition Bensdorp bakes into every strategy. Individually, none of these is going to make your jaw drop. The Meta StrategyWealthLab’s Meta Strategy feature lets you run multiple strategies simultaneously and treat them as a single unified portfolio. DrKoch loaded all seven in with equal weighting. Start with this chart - all seven individual profit curves overlaid on one graph: Take a moment with this one. A few things to notice: The purple line, representing the Catastrophe Hedge, actually goes negative over much of the period and sits below zero at the end. By any conventional measure, you would throw that system out. The pink Mean Reversion Selloff flatlines for years at a stretch while the orange Trend Low Volatility meanders with no conviction through long stretches of the backtest. And yet. The combined Meta Strategy produces a 16.70% APR with a max drawdown of just 8.22% and a Sharpe of 2.12. No individual system in this portfolio gets close to that risk-adjusted profile. What produces it is not any single edge. It is the fact that they don't fail at the same time. When the Catastrophe Hedge is bleeding, which it does during extended bull markets by design, the trend following systems are running hard. When the trend systems stall in a choppy and range bound tape, the mean reversion systems are printing trades. The system that looks like deadweight in isolation is doing a job you cannot see until you view the whole ensemble. Now look at the combined equity curve against the benchmark: This is on a log scale, which is the right way to look at long run compounding. The black line is the S&P 500. Notice what happens during 2000 to 2002 and again in 2008 to 2009 where the benchmark gets cut nearly in half both times. The green equity curve barely registers those events by comparison. The portfolio is not just compounding faster than the benchmark, it is doing it with dramatically less drawdown through the two worst market environments of the last 30 years. That's the payoff from running systems that don't all hate the same market conditions. The Correlation MatrixDrKoch published the correlation matrix of all seven systems against each other, and this is where the mechanics become clear: There are low correlations across the board. These systems are not seven versions of the same bet. They are seven genuinely different bets that each have a positive expected value but do not tend to lose at the same time. This distinction matters more than most traders realize. You can build ten trend-following systems and think you have a diversified portfolio. But if they all get long in the same bull run and all get stopped out in the same crash, your correlation is effectively 1.0 where it hurts most. The diversification is an illusion. True uncorrelation means the system that struggles in a choppy, low-volatility grind is offset by the one that thrives in it. The one that bleeds during a slow melt-up is covered by the one that’s short parabolic names. That’s what this correlation matrix is showing you. Out-of-Sample ValidationDrKoch tested the Meta Strategy on data from 2022 onward, which was a period deliberately kept out of development. It held up. That is not a trivial result. 2022 was a genuinely difficult environment that broke a lot of strategies that looked great in backtests. The diversification effect here was not curve fitted to a particular historical window. The Core IdeaThe reason this thread is worth studying isn’t the specific parameters. It’s the demonstration of a principle that holds up across markets, timeframes, and system types: The portfolio is the strategy. Individual systems are the components while uncorrelation is the architecture. The equity curve you are trying to build is not the output of any single system but the output of how they interact with each other. If you’re backtesting systems in isolation and selecting the ones with the best individual metrics, you may be optimizing the wrong thing. A system with a modest Sharpe ratio that is genuinely uncorrelated with your existing portfolio contributes more than a high-performing system that largely mirrors what you already have. The question worth asking about any new system you build isn’t just “does this work? It’s “what does it look like when I add this to everything else I'm running?”. I am constantly on the lookout for new uncorrelated systems. What does your current system portfolio look like from a correlation standpoint? I’d be curious to hear in the comments. Have Great Night! Dave Johnson via Trading Time Machine https://ift.tt/Xo6rUQG
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One of the most underappreciated ideas in systematic trading is that you do not need great systems as much as you need uncorrelated ones. I want to walk you through a forum thread that illustrates this beautifully. A WealthLab community member named DrKoch, a developer some of you will recognize from his Finantic indicators extensions, implemented all seven trading systems from Laurens Bensdorp’s book Automated Stock Trading Systems and combined them into a single Meta Strategy. The thread is here, and I would encourage you to read it in full: Laurens Bensdorp’s Automated Stock Trading Systems - WealthLab Discussion What makes this worth your time is not just the systems themselves, but what happens when you put them together and what the correlation matrix reveals about why it works. The Seven SystemsBensdorp’s seven systems each target a distinct market condition. DrKoch implemented all of them with full production grade architecture including liquidity filters, differentiator conditions, setups, entries, ranking logic, and a complete exit suite. Here’s the lineup:
These include long and short positions as well as trend and mean reversion across calm and volatile markets. Each system is deliberately built to behave differently from the others, which is the differentiator condition Bensdorp bakes into every strategy. Individually, none of these is going to make your jaw drop. The Meta StrategyWealthLab’s Meta Strategy feature lets you run multiple strategies simultaneously and treat them as a single unified portfolio. DrKoch loaded all seven in with equal weighting. Start with this chart - all seven individual profit curves overlaid on one graph: Take a moment with this one. A few things to notice: The purple line, representing the Catastrophe Hedge, actually goes negative over much of the period and sits below zero at the end. By any conventional measure, you would throw that system out. The pink Mean Reversion Selloff flatlines for years at a stretch while the orange Trend Low Volatility meanders with no conviction through long stretches of the backtest. And yet. The combined Meta Strategy produces a 16.70% APR with a max drawdown of just 8.22% and a Sharpe of 2.12. No individual system in this portfolio gets close to that risk-adjusted profile. What produces it is not any single edge. It is the fact that they don't fail at the same time. When the Catastrophe Hedge is bleeding, which it does during extended bull markets by design, the trend following systems are running hard. When the trend systems stall in a choppy and range bound tape, the mean reversion systems are printing trades. The system that looks like deadweight in isolation is doing a job you cannot see until you view the whole ensemble. Now look at the combined equity curve against the benchmark: This is on a log scale, which is the right way to look at long run compounding. The black line is the S&P 500. Notice what happens during 2000 to 2002 and again in 2008 to 2009 where the benchmark gets cut nearly in half both times. The green equity curve barely registers those events by comparison. The portfolio is not just compounding faster than the benchmark, it is doing it with dramatically less drawdown through the two worst market environments of the last 30 years. That's the payoff from running systems that don't all hate the same market conditions. The Correlation MatrixDrKoch published the correlation matrix of all seven systems against each other, and this is where the mechanics become clear: There are low correlations across the board. These systems are not seven versions of the same bet. They are seven genuinely different bets that each have a positive expected value but do not tend to lose at the same time. This distinction matters more than most traders realize. You can build ten trend-following systems and think you have a diversified portfolio. But if they all get long in the same bull run and all get stopped out in the same crash, your correlation is effectively 1.0 where it hurts most. The diversification is an illusion. True uncorrelation means the system that struggles in a choppy, low-volatility grind is offset by the one that thrives in it. The one that bleeds during a slow melt-up is covered by the one that’s short parabolic names. That’s what this correlation matrix is showing you. Out-of-Sample ValidationDrKoch tested the Meta Strategy on data from 2022 onward, which was a period deliberately kept out of development. It held up. That is not a trivial result. 2022 was a genuinely difficult environment that broke a lot of strategies that looked great in backtests. The diversification effect here was not curve fitted to a particular historical window. The Core IdeaThe reason this thread is worth studying isn’t the specific parameters. It’s the demonstration of a principle that holds up across markets, timeframes, and system types: The portfolio is the strategy. Individual systems are the components while uncorrelation is the architecture. The equity curve you are trying to build is not the output of any single system but the output of how they interact with each other. If you’re backtesting systems in isolation and selecting the ones with the best individual metrics, you may be optimizing the wrong thing. A system with a modest Sharpe ratio that is genuinely uncorrelated with your existing portfolio contributes more than a high-performing system that largely mirrors what you already have. The question worth asking about any new system you build isn’t just “does this work? It’s “what does it look like when I add this to everything else I'm running?”. I am constantly on the lookout for new uncorrelated systems. What does your current system portfolio look like from a correlation standpoint? I’d be curious to hear in the comments. Have Great Night! Dave Johnson Via https://backtest.substack.com/p/building-a-better-system-from-a-bunch The defining analytical event of the past week was not a military strike or a diplomatic breakthrough. It was a sentence from Donald Trump posted to Truth Social. By announcing a ceasefire extension until Iran produces a unified proposal, Trump publicly acknowledged what this analytical model identified at baseline: the United States is conducting peace negotiations with an entity that cannot constitutionally authorize a deal. The acknowledgment was accurate. The strategic response was not. An open-ended extension conditioned on Iranian internal coherence transfers the decision about whether diplomacy continues to the entity with the greatest structural incentive to prevent it. The IRGC does not want a deal. It wants reconstitution time, reduced military pressure, and maintenance of the Hormuz permission regime it is establishing as a permanent feature of post-war maritime order. The indefinite ceasefire delivers all three simultaneously. The IRGC’s response was immediate and unambiguous: within hours of Trump’s announcement, IRGC gunboats seized two container ships (the MSC Francesca and Epaminodes) and fired on others attempting Hormuz transit. This was not diplomatic confusion. It was the IRGC signaling in operational terms that Trump’s diplomatic decisions do not govern IRGC maritime operations. The civilian and military faces of the Iranian state are not running parallel tracks toward the same destination. They are running contradictory ones, and the military face holds the veto. The week’s most important structural development was the IRGC’s emergence as an independent public voice in Iranian foreign policy. At baseline, the IRGC was assessed as a backstage veto player allowing civilian diplomats to operate as a negotiating facade. This week the IRGC began issuing its own public statements directly contradicting civilian signals in real time. IRGC commander Ali Abdollahi asserted Hormuz control publicly while Foreign Minister Araghchi had signaled openness. Ghalibaf’s adviser dismissed the ceasefire extension as meaningless while President Pezeshkian welcomed dialogue. These are not conflicting signals from a confused government. They are the operational signature of a state where civilian authority has been subordinated so thoroughly that military actors no longer feel the need to maintain even a coordinated facade. That structural shift makes negotiated resolution harder not just diplomatically but mechanically. Any agreement Araghchi reaches can be operationally overridden by the IRGC before the ink is dry. The blockade has achieved its stated disruption targets while developing a new problem: scope versus leakage. The U.S. expanded enforcement to global scope with the Tifani interdiction in the Bay of Bengal, the first Iranian-linked vessel interdicted outside the Middle East region. Simultaneously, reports indicate “ghost fleet” vessels have already circumvented the regional blockade. The headline enforcement is real. The margin leakage is also real. Iran is economically pressured, not economically isolated. That distinction has significant implications for the timeline of capitulation that U.S. strategy requires. Pressure without isolation produces slow attrition, not decisive leverage. China’s behavior this week deserves more analytical attention than it has received in mainstream coverage. Beijing deployed a floating barrier and multiple coast guard vessels to Scarborough Shoal between April 10 and 12, advancing a territorial position while Washington’s strategic bandwidth was maximally consumed by the Hormuz crisis. This is not coincidence. It is the operational expression of multi-theater opportunism: every week the Iran conflict extends is a week China advances in the Pacific with reduced U.S. counter-pressure capacity. The Hormuz crisis is not merely a Middle East energy problem. It is a U.S. strategic bandwidth problem with compounding costs in every theater where Chinese assertiveness is active. The pattern this system is tracking has shifted from the static Korean stalemate the baseline described to the active-fighting-during-armistice variant. The IRGC is not simply waiting out the clock. It is fighting during negotiations, calibrating maritime pressure to stay below the threshold that triggers a renewed military response while accumulating reconstitution progress and establishing Hormuz as an Iranian-permission waterway. This is a more sophisticated adversary posture than the baseline captured, and it has produced a corresponding shift in the analytical assessment. The thesis holds. The mode of expression has upgraded. What comes next depends on a single variable: whether Trump’s recent ultimatum is the line that holds. If strikes resume, the second round faces a partially reconstituted Iran that has spent two weeks demonstrating it can conduct maritime operations during a ceasefire, in the Indo-Pacific as well as the Gulf. If the extension becomes permanent in practice, the conflict enters structural deterioration: a frozen conflict with active maritime harassment as the new normal, an IRGC reconstituting toward pre-war capability, and a Hormuz permission regime hardening into the post-war maritime order. The consequences of that outcome extend well beyond the Middle East. A world in which one-fifth of global energy flows through a chokepoint governed by IRGC authorization is a structurally different world than the one that existed before February 28. The question being settled in the Strait of Hormuz is not just about Iran. It is about whether the institutional frameworks that have governed global energy security for four decades remain functional, or whether a new permission architecture is being installed in their place. Produced by TradingTimeMachine Intelligence Division. AI-assisted open source analysis. Triad Analytical Framework. Via https://backtest.substack.com/p/the-hormuz-veto-why-negotiating-with The defining analytical event of the past week was not a military strike or a diplomatic breakthrough. It was a sentence from Donald Trump posted to Truth Social. By announcing a ceasefire extension until Iran produces a unified proposal, Trump publicly acknowledged what this analytical model identified at baseline: the United States is conducting peace negotiations with an entity that cannot constitutionally authorize a deal. The acknowledgment was accurate. The strategic response was not. An open-ended extension conditioned on Iranian internal coherence transfers the decision about whether diplomacy continues to the entity with the greatest structural incentive to prevent it. The IRGC does not want a deal. It wants reconstitution time, reduced military pressure, and maintenance of the Hormuz permission regime it is establishing as a permanent feature of post-war maritime order. The indefinite ceasefire delivers all three simultaneously. The IRGC’s response was immediate and unambiguous: within hours of Trump’s announcement, IRGC gunboats seized two container ships (the MSC Francesca and Epaminodes) and fired on others attempting Hormuz transit. This was not diplomatic confusion. It was the IRGC signaling in operational terms that Trump’s diplomatic decisions do not govern IRGC maritime operations. The civilian and military faces of the Iranian state are not running parallel tracks toward the same destination. They are running contradictory ones, and the military face holds the veto. The week’s most important structural development was the IRGC’s emergence as an independent public voice in Iranian foreign policy. At baseline, the IRGC was assessed as a backstage veto player allowing civilian diplomats to operate as a negotiating facade. This week the IRGC began issuing its own public statements directly contradicting civilian signals in real time. IRGC commander Ali Abdollahi asserted Hormuz control publicly while Foreign Minister Araghchi had signaled openness. Ghalibaf’s adviser dismissed the ceasefire extension as meaningless while President Pezeshkian welcomed dialogue. These are not conflicting signals from a confused government. They are the operational signature of a state where civilian authority has been subordinated so thoroughly that military actors no longer feel the need to maintain even a coordinated facade. That structural shift makes negotiated resolution harder not just diplomatically but mechanically. Any agreement Araghchi reaches can be operationally overridden by the IRGC before the ink is dry. The blockade has achieved its stated disruption targets while developing a new problem: scope versus leakage. The U.S. expanded enforcement to global scope with the Tifani interdiction in the Bay of Bengal, the first Iranian-linked vessel interdicted outside the Middle East region. Simultaneously, reports indicate “ghost fleet” vessels have already circumvented the regional blockade. The headline enforcement is real. The margin leakage is also real. Iran is economically pressured, not economically isolated. That distinction has significant implications for the timeline of capitulation that U.S. strategy requires. Pressure without isolation produces slow attrition, not decisive leverage. China’s behavior this week deserves more analytical attention than it has received in mainstream coverage. Beijing deployed a floating barrier and multiple coast guard vessels to Scarborough Shoal between April 10 and 12, advancing a territorial position while Washington’s strategic bandwidth was maximally consumed by the Hormuz crisis. This is not coincidence. It is the operational expression of multi-theater opportunism: every week the Iran conflict extends is a week China advances in the Pacific with reduced U.S. counter-pressure capacity. The Hormuz crisis is not merely a Middle East energy problem. It is a U.S. strategic bandwidth problem with compounding costs in every theater where Chinese assertiveness is active. The pattern this system is tracking has shifted from the static Korean stalemate the baseline described to the active-fighting-during-armistice variant. The IRGC is not simply waiting out the clock. It is fighting during negotiations, calibrating maritime pressure to stay below the threshold that triggers a renewed military response while accumulating reconstitution progress and establishing Hormuz as an Iranian-permission waterway. This is a more sophisticated adversary posture than the baseline captured, and it has produced a corresponding shift in the analytical assessment. The thesis holds. The mode of expression has upgraded. What comes next depends on a single variable: whether Trump’s recent ultimatum is the line that holds. If strikes resume, the second round faces a partially reconstituted Iran that has spent two weeks demonstrating it can conduct maritime operations during a ceasefire, in the Indo-Pacific as well as the Gulf. If the extension becomes permanent in practice, the conflict enters structural deterioration: a frozen conflict with active maritime harassment as the new normal, an IRGC reconstituting toward pre-war capability, and a Hormuz permission regime hardening into the post-war maritime order. The consequences of that outcome extend well beyond the Middle East. A world in which one-fifth of global energy flows through a chokepoint governed by IRGC authorization is a structurally different world than the one that existed before February 28. The question being settled in the Strait of Hormuz is not just about Iran. It is about whether the institutional frameworks that have governed global energy security for four decades remain functional, or whether a new permission architecture is being installed in their place. Produced by TradingTimeMachine Intelligence Division. AI-assisted open source analysis. Triad Analytical Framework. via Trading Time Machine https://ift.tt/TClqf3M Sorry for the sporadic posts lately. I am relocating to Italy, and the preparation for that has consumed most of my bandwidth. More on that at the end. First, what actually matters right now. The market is down 0.02% on the year , with some serious volatility thrown in. Bear Hunter is up 4.43%. What is Bear Hunter? Bear Hunter is a rules-based tactical SPY system built for one specific environment: turbulent markets. When volatility is low, it sits in cash. When the VIX environment shifts and conditions align, it steps in, holds a few days, and exits. Clean. Mechanical. No emotion involved. No options. No shorting. No margin. Just SPY, long only, in the moments when the edge is highest. 2026 So Far The early months of this year have been exactly the kind of environment Bear Hunter was built for. Elevated volatility. wide range days, headline-driven tape. Bear Hunter does not wait for things to settle down. It hunts inside the chaos. The trades speak for themselves. Every trade Bear Hunter has executed this year is in the screenshot above. You can judge the entries and exits yourself. Five trades into 2026 and the system is already behaving almost exactly as the backtest predicts. Three winners, two losers. 60% win rate, same as the historical profile across 400-plus trades. The winners averaged 1.91% and the losers averaged 0.82%, compared to the historical averages of 2.56% and 1.49%. Pretty close for five trades. That is actually the cool part about rigorous backtesting done right. It does not just tell you what happened in the past. It gives you a reasonable picture of what to expect going forward, even in small samples. If you want to go deeper, the full trade log going back to 1996, every drawdown, every stat, all of it is publicly available here: Full Trade history and Stats Nothing hidden. Nothing cherry-picked. Just the data. The App Got a Full Rebuild On top of the live performance, the Bear Hunter app (runs in any browser) just came out of a complete redesign. Dark interface, clean signal display, fully mobile-friendly. The daily routine has always been simple and now it looks the part too. After market close, open the app, read the signal, close the app. That is the whole job. Want the Full Picture? Everything you need to evaluate Bear Hunter, the 30-year equity curve, compounding table, worst drawdown stats, the purchase link, all of it lives on the Bear Hunter page at TradingTimeMachine.com. Go take a look. And while you are there, I would genuinely love your feedback. Does the page tell the story clearly? Is anything missing or confusing? Is there something you would want to see before pulling the trigger that is not there? Drop a comment below or reach out directly. This product is newly launched and real feedback from real traders is worth more to me than any marketing copy I could write. One More Thing Life stuff is in full swing as I get ready to make my move to Italy. We are heading to the Puglia region, right in the heel of the boot, and I cannot wait. A winter without snow! Sun-drenched olive groves. The turquoise waters of the Adriatic. A quiet piazza and a glass of local Primitivo with my best friend and wife (the same person - lol). That is the dream and it is finally coming together. Bear with me (pun absolutely intended) while I get the pieces in place. Once I land there I will have far more time to write about backtests, trading systems, and whatever the markets are throwing at us. Until then, thanks for hanging in there. Have a Great Day! Dave Johnson TradingTimeMachine.com Via https://backtest.substack.com/p/bear-hunter-is-live-and-2026-is-already Sorry for the sporadic posts lately. I am relocating to Italy, and the preparation for that has consumed most of my bandwidth. More on that at the end. First, what actually matters right now. The market is down 0.02% on the year , with some serious volatility thrown in. Bear Hunter is up 4.43%. What is Bear Hunter? Bear Hunter is a rules-based tactical SPY system built for one specific environment: turbulent markets. When volatility is low, it sits in cash. When the VIX environment shifts and conditions align, it steps in, holds a few days, and exits. Clean. Mechanical. No emotion involved. No options. No shorting. No margin. Just SPY, long only, in the moments when the edge is highest. 2026 So Far The early months of this year have been exactly the kind of environment Bear Hunter was built for. Elevated volatility. wide range days, headline-driven tape. Bear Hunter does not wait for things to settle down. It hunts inside the chaos. The trades speak for themselves. Every trade Bear Hunter has executed this year is in the screenshot above. You can judge the entries and exits yourself. Five trades into 2026 and the system is already behaving almost exactly as the backtest predicts. Three winners, two losers. 60% win rate, same as the historical profile across 400-plus trades. The winners averaged 1.91% and the losers averaged 0.82%, compared to the historical averages of 2.56% and 1.49%. Pretty close for five trades. That is actually the cool part about rigorous backtesting done right. It does not just tell you what happened in the past. It gives you a reasonable picture of what to expect going forward, even in small samples. If you want to go deeper, the full trade log going back to 1996, every drawdown, every stat, all of it is publicly available here: Full Trade history and Stats Nothing hidden. Nothing cherry-picked. Just the data. The App Got a Full Rebuild On top of the live performance, the Bear Hunter app (runs in any browser) just came out of a complete redesign. Dark interface, clean signal display, fully mobile-friendly. The daily routine has always been simple and now it looks the part too. After market close, open the app, read the signal, close the app. That is the whole job. Want the Full Picture? Everything you need to evaluate Bear Hunter, the 30-year equity curve, compounding table, worst drawdown stats, the purchase link, all of it lives on the Bear Hunter page at TradingTimeMachine.com. Go take a look. And while you are there, I would genuinely love your feedback. Does the page tell the story clearly? Is anything missing or confusing? Is there something you would want to see before pulling the trigger that is not there? Drop a comment below or reach out directly. This product is newly launched and real feedback from real traders is worth more to me than any marketing copy I could write. One More Thing Life stuff is in full swing as I get ready to make my move to Italy. We are heading to the Puglia region, right in the heel of the boot, and I cannot wait. A winter without snow! Sun-drenched olive groves. The turquoise waters of the Adriatic. A quiet piazza and a glass of local Primitivo with my best friend and wife (the same person - lol). That is the dream and it is finally coming together. Bear with me (pun absolutely intended) while I get the pieces in place. Once I land there I will have far more time to write about backtests, trading systems, and whatever the markets are throwing at us. Until then, thanks for hanging in there. Have a Great Day! Dave Johnson TradingTimeMachine.com via Trading Time Machine https://ift.tt/7pV34zS Just published a new free indicator on TradingView — TTM Force Imbalance Oscillator Most oscillators tell you direction. This one tells you WHO IS WINNING. tradingview.com/script/lOq6vpKo The idea is simple but underexplored: Separately track the average SIZE of up-moves vs down-moves over a rolling window. When buyers are winning LARGER bars than sellers — even in a sideways market — that’s accumulation pressure building. When sellers win larger bars, you get distribution pressure. The oscillator plots that imbalance normalized from -1 to +1. Zero = perfect symmetry. The further from zero, the more one side is dominating. What makes it different from RSI or momentum indicators: RSI also compares up-moves to down-moves, but it’s tuned for overbought/oversold extremes. TTM FIO is tuned differently: it asks which side is currently winning the SIZE battle, centered at zero, so you can read accumulation vs distribution pressure across timeframes in real time. It includes a Multi Time-Frame dashboard with W / D / 1H / 20m / 5m bias all on one table. Right now on TSLA for example: • W: Neutral • D: Bear Bias • 1H: Bull Bias • 20m: Neutral • 5m: Neutral That divergence between D and 1H is worth watching. Free and open source on TradingView. Search: TTM Force Imbalance Oscillator or direct link: tradingview.com/script/lOq6vpKo More tools at TradingTimeMachine.com Dave Via https://backtest.substack.com/p/the-ttm-force-imbalance-oscillator Just published a new free indicator on TradingView — TTM Force Imbalance Oscillator Most oscillators tell you direction. This one tells you WHO IS WINNING. tradingview.com/script/lOq6vpKo The idea is simple but underexplored: Separately track the average SIZE of up-moves vs down-moves over a rolling window. When buyers are winning LARGER bars than sellers — even in a sideways market — that’s accumulation pressure building. When sellers win larger bars, you get distribution pressure. The oscillator plots that imbalance normalized from -1 to +1. Zero = perfect symmetry. The further from zero, the more one side is dominating. What makes it different from RSI or momentum indicators: RSI also compares up-moves to down-moves, but it’s tuned for overbought/oversold extremes. TTM FIO is tuned differently: it asks which side is currently winning the SIZE battle, centered at zero, so you can read accumulation vs distribution pressure across timeframes in real time. It includes a Multi Time-Frame dashboard with W / D / 1H / 20m / 5m bias all on one table. Right now on TSLA for example: • W: Neutral • D: Bear Bias • 1H: Bull Bias • 20m: Neutral • 5m: Neutral That divergence between D and 1H is worth watching. Free and open source on TradingView. Search: TTM Force Imbalance Oscillator or direct link: tradingview.com/script/lOq6vpKo More tools at TradingTimeMachine.com Dave via Trading Time Machine https://ift.tt/9RKZL7m I want to apologize for the lack of content recently. The market has been volatile and, in the midst of it, we have been preparing our house for sale. We are moving to Italy! It has been a steady stream of home projects and contractors over the last few weeks. Between the constant noise of renovations and the logistical puzzle of getting a house market-ready, my bandwidth has been stretched thin. On top of the physical work on the house, this is not your normal move. We are making the radical choice to get rid of a large percent of the things we own. There is a very practical logic behind this decision. It makes little sense to deal with the cost and headache of shipping furniture and household goods across the ocean when I can find the same things once we arrive. Beyond the logistics, there is a deeper realization at play here: I simply won’t need as much stuff in our new life. There is something remarkably clarifying about looking at everything you own and realizing that very little of it is actually essential. I appreciate your patience while I navigate this transition. I plan to be much more engaged soon, and I am particularly looking forward to sharing updates once I am settled into my new setup. Moving the “Time Machine” to a new continent is a major shift, and I am excited to see what the view looks like from the other side. Everything we own might be disappearing, but the one thing I am holding onto is the lady by my side. She is as 'fancy' as ever, and I look forward to the next twenty eight years of discovery together as we make Italy our new home. Ciao! Dave via Trading Time Machine https://ift.tt/RyG6neD I want to apologize for the lack of content recently. The market has been volatile and, in the midst of it, we have been preparing our house for sale. We are moving to Italy! It has been a steady stream of home projects and contractors over the last few weeks. Between the constant noise of renovations and the logistical puzzle of getting a house market-ready, my bandwidth has been stretched thin. On top of the physical work on the house, this is not your normal move. We are making the radical choice to get rid of a large percent of the things we own. There is a very practical logic behind this decision. It makes little sense to deal with the cost and headache of shipping furniture and household goods across the ocean when I can find the same things once we arrive. Beyond the logistics, there is a deeper realization at play here: I simply won’t need as much stuff in our new life. There is something remarkably clarifying about looking at everything you own and realizing that very little of it is actually essential. I appreciate your patience while I navigate this transition. I plan to be much more engaged soon, and I am particularly looking forward to sharing updates once I am settled into my new setup. Moving the “Time Machine” to a new continent is a major shift, and I am excited to see what the view looks like from the other side. Everything we own might be disappearing, but the one thing I am holding onto is the lady by my side. She is as 'fancy' as ever, and I look forward to the next twenty eight years of discovery together as we make Italy our new home. Ciao! Dave Via https://backtest.substack.com/p/a-big-move |
Dave JohnsonI'm Dave Johnson, a former investment advisor and quantitative system developer with over 30 years of experience building and trading mechanical systems. These days I focus on rules-based research, honest backtests, and sharing what the data actually shows. Archives
August 2026
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