Someone who has trading ability may well be able to use any trading process and still be profitable. But anyone with common sense should adopt a process that has obvious merit. If someone is stupid enough to trade using crank methods of waves, fibs, moon cycles etc - then unless they have trading ability from the start they will likely fail. The act of following any process though should at least mitigate the effects of ego, opinions and emotions - and help the trader to survive long enough to find a method that works for them.
Maybe something like this is why 95% cannot win or be right: The sheep are happy to be the sheep deep inside, because they are in the majority and to be the wolf is a lonely game of only a few... But back to your first comment: Do you really think that the things that is known to the public doesn't work, that made you make the comment to my post or is it something else?
I have to say I agree with you. Everytime I hear this or that doesnât work I always ask why? I rarely get an answer. For every methodology you have mentioned I can show you examples of where it didnât work. But thatâs only one trade, Over a number of trades with the proper money management most will be profitable or at least not blow out your account. Most fail because they donât have the patience or discipline to follow a system.
IMHO, there are really to separate categories of trading / traders: intraday & swing/position. - Intraday trading is the most difficult to get consistently profitable at, and there ain't that many books or disclosed methods/systems that offer cookie-cutter replicable profitability (none to my limited knowledge, I'll be glad to learn different). - Swing/position trading stocks is a little easier because of the long-term bullish bias of the stock market. But then one should measure his trading performance vs the market performance (so-called Alpha), and all of a sudden it is way more difficult to do better than the market on a long-term basis. Still, there are a number of books that can help achieve that (at least, that's my belief).
The reality is most people cannot see something which is right in front of their eyes because they have the wrong mindset. Like me... For the first year I was trading I thought technicals were BS and it was all an instinct game. Now I use mostly technicals and less and less instinct... I developed my own technical system in a way that I could see the signals and moves with my own eyes and cross compare them to price to verify that everything is correct. It's less of a "exact technical rule based system", and more of an "advanced tape reading system."
When people here say that "nothing works," what they mean is that either they lost, or were unable to find something with a Sharpe ratio of 10 so that they could leverage up a piker's stake into a living.
Everyone knows how to lose weight. There are many different "methods" that can accomplish the task. How many can do it and keep it off for the rest of their life without "blowing up". Requires hard work, discipline, and persistence. I think trading is similar.
I don't know where the deal with everything works comes from. Have you backtested these methods? Some of them don't even have strategies. They are figments of the author's imagination, like Tharp.
This is not entirely true. For weight loss only two methods work, eat less calories or burn more while maintaining calories. Does all of successful trading come down to one of two possibilities?
Of course noTHING "works." It is the person using the thing who works. This is not to say that any thing is as good to use as any other thing or that what is best to use is based on the trader's "personality." People who think that way have yet to hone (iteratively refine) a great method that they completely trust. Complete trust is not an easy thing to come by. The process of arriving at such a method does discard a lot of fluff that's held out to the public as viable. There is no secret, but to most people it might as well be a secret because what it takes to extract will remain a mystery to them.