the-daily-trading-coach-101-lessons-for-becoming-your-own-trading-psychologist-brett-steenbarger-_2009_-a23

312 THE DAILY TRADING COACHAs you might suspect, a database can get large quickly. With a columnin a spreadsheet for each of the following: date, open price, high price,low price, closing price, volume, rate of change, and several variables(indicators) that you track, you can have a large sheet for each stock orfutures contract that you trade—particularly if you are archiving intradaydata. I strongly recommend that beginners at this kind of historicalinvestigation get their feet wet with daily data. This process will keepthe data sets manageable and will be helpful in framing longer timeframehypotheses that can supplement intraday observation and judgment. Manygood swing patterns can be found with daily data and clean, affordabledata are readily available.Some of the most promising historical patterns occur over a periodof several days to several weeks.There are several possible sources for your historical database. Manyreal-time platforms archive considerable historical data on their servers.You can download these data from programs such as e-Signal and Real Tick(two vendors I’ve personally used) and update your databases manually atthe end of the trading day. The advantage of this solution is that it keepsyou from the expense of purchasing historical data from vendors. It alsoenables you to capture just the data you want in the way you want to storethem. This is how I collect most of my intraday data for stock index futuresand such variables as NYSE TICK. My spreadsheet is laid out in columns inways that I find intuitive. The entire process of updating a sheet, includingbuilt in charts, takes a few minutes at most.A second way you can go, which I also use, is to purchase historicaldata from a vendor. I obtain daily data from Pinnacle Data(www.pinnacledata.com), which includes an online program for updatingthat is idiot-proof. Many of their data fields go back far in market history,and many of them cover markets and indicators that I would not be ableto easily archive on my own. The data are automatically saved in Excelsheets, with a separate sheet for each data element. That means that youhave to enter the different sheets and pull out all the data relevant to a particularhypothesis and time frame. The various fields can be copied onto asingle worksheet that you can use for your historical investigations (moreon this later). Among the data that I find useful from Pinnacle Data areadvance-decline information; new highs/lows; volume (including up/downvolume); interest rates; commodity and currency prices; and weekly data.These data are general market data, not data for individual equities. WhenI collect individual equity data, I generally find the historical data from thereal-time quotation platforms to be adequate to my needs.