codehead

Ancient Microsoft proprietary codec--works under Windows Media Player.

Oh yeah, it was call the "100 club"--IIRC, they would accept the first 100 people who paid to be a part of it. It was dissolved and I believe they returned everyone's money. The point is, if they had been able to automate it, they would have. Whew, just there's a lot of soap-opera-type info available on the web about Woodie's CCI Club--I had read some of it before, and knew some of it from being in the room at the time, but picked up on a few details. For one thing, I joined shortly after "Dr. Famir" (Firouz Amirparviz) died, which was late 2004; Woodie had renamed the "Shamu" trade as the "Famir", in his honor. What I didn't know at the time was that the doctor had committed suicide--according to some sources, due to having lost his money trading CCI. Most, or all, of the moderators I used to listen to where either booted for adding non-cci techniques or they couldn't make cci work and quit. I see that even gb007, for which the "gb100" trade was named, eventually bail (wondering if this course still calls the trade by that name, or they renamed it?). One last point on the CCI itself. The CCI calculation involves calculating the price deviation from the moving average. So, basically, you'll be looking at the de-trended price action. That is, when price is moving up steadily in a line, CCI will be moving sideways in line. This makes it much easier to see changes in the strength of a move. Search for Tucker Report and CCI for an interesting analysis of the CCI.

I was thinking a bit more about my history with Woodie's CCI... Some time after I began to follow his room, Woodie pushed for automated trading. He contended that people failed with his CCI techniques due to emotion, and if you could get a monkey to follow his rules, he'd make money. So, a CCI "monkey" was pursued. The first try with with TradeMaven software supported by broker PFG. Initial scripts were written to trade the ZLR and a few other patterns, and touted as having some initial success--they'd report each day how much the monkey was up, etc. I signed up and started trying it on real money, and it wasn't working well so I stopped before I lost much. In the past few years, I look in on what they are doing every once in a while, and they've tried several different trading programs for automated trading. They always seem to be reporting that they are making progress, but I've never seen a history of success with it. I recall at one point that instead of trying to develop trading scripts and giving people free access to them, they were instead working on having people pay a fee to use more of a black-box system, where their account was traded for them by an automated system managed by the broker. That never came to fruition, as far as I know. If Woodie's claim that his method was simple and worked, surely an automated system would be successful. But several years later... still nothing that I know of. Again, I think his method can be very useful, but I think the claim that you can trade it with no other input can't be supported.

I haven't seen the course. A few of years ago, when starting out trading futures (I was a stock trader for years), I followed Woodie's CCI, in his hotcomm room. A few comments: It's a nice and useful indicator. Woodie pushes it as the key to trading success, to the point he advocates trading via the indicator alone, without a price chart, and no other indicators (his version of CCI does have some least-squared moving averages and other things build it). He claimed to do this himself. When Woodie called the room, I was always impressed that he seems to know when to scratch out, and when to stay in for a really big move. People sometimes claim that he doesn't trade, but he seemed pretty adept at it to me. Some of the other moderators were very good traders, and used Woodie's CCi along with other methods. Woodie ran these people out of the room. He wanted pure Woodie's CCI. The moderators that were left didn't seem to be highly successful. They'd make the calls for the sessions, but when asked how their own trading was progressing, it would be like, "my trading is improving and coming along--most days I make like $50 now. Usually." I popped into the room quite a while back, and commented on a developing pattern "on the 3 minute chart", and was scolded pretty quick about it, since they had moved to range charts since I'd been gone. They didn't want any talk of minute-based charts any longer. I think it's a very good indicator--much better than most. It's no holy grail though--none of them are.