i started out like most or many traders,by trying to study market movements, to make 'sense' of them.but after 20 years i have to say that i am no nearer to this goal. when i first came across Brooks, he too was on the same road: he said a trader has to trade all kinds of markets whatever the conditions are ;if you cannot swing scalp. This after ten years i have failed to succeed in. i must say in Brooks defense that he has laid lot of emphasis on risk reward strategies, which i did not due to which i havd suffered. Bollinger on the other hand says that you cannot understand the markets,that continuous advice is impossible, and the only thing to do was to have a risk to reward way of trading.
Not too much of the thoughts.You didn`t say nothing about yourself.Trading is about yourself and yourself only, not Brooks or Bollinger.
There are strategies that work with positive expectation but very low sharpe. You need to trade lots of them to have an ok equity curve. They are also easier to find if you have longer time horizons. In fact buy and hold is quite hard to beat so you can just use that with sensible portfolio balancing...
He did not waste his live, he spent it trying to achieve something that is important to him. That takes balls and even more balls takes to talk openly about the failure. A lot of so called successful men, never followed their heart. They hate their job, do not love they wife, wait all week for Friday to come, and then for the retirement.... to be relived from their constant misery.