DAILY DIRECTION
W. D. Gann stated that in 1908 he made 288 trades on Union Pacific stock from Oklahoma. Only 20 ended in loss. More remarkable than his percentage of winners was the attestation that he must have been day trading. With the Saturday sessions back then, it appears he traded about once a day- all but about 25 days of that year. And we can imagine there was a great delay in market data for day trading, especially in the early days of the stock ticker.
He must have been using a technique that gave him a general direction for the main market move of the day. I believe that Gann was using this unique directional forecasting technique described in "The Truth Of The Stock Tape." Like the curves #1 and #2 we find in Gann's forecasting, Gann had two systems of Day Divination.
It is pointless to display a chart here. But we can give you back-testing stats below for 2018 for each day. The premise is simple, rule-based, and the back-testing for both are astounding. The directional determination gives one of 3 signals each day: up-move from open, down-move from open, or no bias in daily move. The technique works incredibly on the US Indexes from the 9:30am EST open. The indications for any day can be given years in advance. The formula is completely objective and only takes about 30 seconds to get the reading.
For days where a move was predicted from the open, Directional Determination was correct 82% of days for 2018 for both systems. Since I am big on the science of back-testing as a CMT, following are the criteria for the back-testing. For days Directional Determination gives a move prediction, if the move from the open in magnitude and time is greatest in the direction predicted, then it is counted as correct. In the case where there are moves in 2 different directions during the day, the move in the predicted direction must be at least 75% of the magnitude of any move in the opposite direction.
The difference between the two systems is that the first is simpler but gives only around 160 indication days per year. The second gives about 210.
In Gann's day, there was much less intraday chop and cleaner moves. We believe that Gann simply traded in the direction of the predicted trend off the bell and took targets at squares or total ranges.