I am an advocate of technical analysis trading. Continually T/A shows great promise and can have it's run of success which is why it perpetuates the notion that it does work. Then it seems just as you leverage up, it fails and wipes you out. Only to get back in sync and start working again as your account has been drained. I went thru this for many years boom and bust. Sophisticated math became my pursuit and for years. If the math wasn't complicated to the point of being a classified national security algorithm, then it was not worthy enough to pursue. That was the thought process and having exhausted all those avenues as well it was still hit and miss. Make no mistake we are not just talking about obtaining and edge to be profitable but seeking perfection of understanding price movement. Luckily some of the discovered algorithms had runs of profitability which helped to finance research and keep the discovery process alive. Finally the culprit was discovered, the one ingredient which kept poisoning the process. Math itself is thought to be perfect, then why when applied to market data did it fail. The answer is that the math was being tainted with the input of time. Consider taking the time out of the data and now math can do it's job consistently. Mark
Is not time a defacto ingredient of all "plans" by the very definition of the word and reality itself?
Interestingly if one were to attempt to use a random process to predict random data, "coincidences" would be observed to appear and just as abruptly disappear open your eyes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coincidence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_picking_(fallacy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_inertia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_bias_mitigation
It's not time, it's the math. Time is just the dimension in which change takes place. And the markets are constantly changing. Unless the mathematics is designed to be adaptive to market changes, it will eventually fail no matter how sophisticated it is.
Great links, I just love this one paragraph from the cognitive inertia link. One example of cognitive inertia concerns managers at the Polaroid corporation, whose belief that the company could not make money on hardware but only on consumables led them to neglect the growth in digital imaging technologies; because the trend was denied by the prevailing "mental model" of the business, the corporation failed to adapt effectively to market changes
Do not try and change the time, that's impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth...there is no time.
I think that when time is eliminated from the display of market data we find that the data is much more stable and reveals itself nearly a constant of definable motions. Those motions cataloged can perfectly define all market movement with no surprises. Now applying math to the data we can get constant and even predictable results.