Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication

One of my favorite trading systems is a scalper of my own that I use at GO! Standard account. I love this strategy because it is so damn simple and it works much, much better than hundreds more complex things I tried...  

It uses only a few moving averages, as well as calculate price deviations. By doing this it looks at three dimensions of price movement:

1. direction 
2. deviation
3. volatility  

Idea in short: if there is some consistent direction of the price movement, and price moves sharply* enough against it (without breaking the most recent retracements deviation pattern) - the system enters trade in the direction of the main move.

Sharply* is very relative but it is the key. Obviously the system doesn't try to match the main trend volatility, but rather the most recent volatility. For example: it looks for a sharp retracement in the morning compared to nightly volatility. This volatility is in fact very small compared to day-time one, but the short term deviation will be negative and main trade direction maintained. In general, smaller volatility periods are present very often during all kind of trends and the trades are distributed almost equally throughout the day.

This system works on multiple timeframes and symbols (currencies as well as indices), however my favorite one is EURUSD 1M. The Risk to Reward ratio is dynamic, depends on pair / timeframe. 

I even thought about publishing source code of this EA... But I won't. Why? Why should I...? EURUSD 1M backtest:

China

Right now I am spending some time on a business trip in Shanghai. And while everyone thinks about the Eurozone debt crisis, in China things aren’t going well either. In the center there are lots of tall living houses, in which two bedroom flats cost ca. $700 k. One family houses nearby cost $4 mln each... Those prices are close to insane compared to what you can get for this money in other parts of the world.. But still in Shanghai there are thousands of construction sites... PMI fallen recently below 50, and GDP is not growing as fast as it used to grow. Also when I look at for instance IT services rates, those are becoming closer to those in Central European rates, so growing at 7% pace will not be as easy as it used to be in the past… Government is focusing on innovations and services, however transformation from an industrial economy will take many years.

Not only in Europe things aren't looking very promising…