You are a blatant liar and very sneaky individual. Your point 5 is the ENTIRE CULPRIT of this issue: Live calls are the ONLY way (aside audited broker statements) to receive reliable and trustworthy data to verify someone's trading acumen. Everyone I recall to have criticized TA here on this site always called for live trades/calls. Show us a place where someone claims to use technical analysis and makes live calls. If the aggregate performance over time is worth the risk taken then you just converted the rest of the world. Of course you say you won't do that (not only because such does not exist) because you don't care what others believe...well...that begs the question then why you write lengthy posts promoting TA. Unless of course you have a commercial interest in doing so...
If you say so Something regarding a forest and trees comes to mind If I said: Howdy WRB Any though who I might be directing the "howdy" toward RN
Some might be interested to listen to this very recent interview with Aronson... http://bettersystemtrader.com/028-david-aronson/ My takeaway is that he does believe there is merit in TA (in fact, he is still currently using TA based features in his methodologies), however, he also believes that those who tend to follow and promote ancient, non-scientific methods, have been marginalized and are progressively being replaced by more intelligent and modernized quantitative methods (much like astrologers were marginalized by astronomists). I tend to agree with that stance, and think that the main beef many have against TA, is that the huge deluge of subjective literature and promotion of non-scientific methods have done a great disservice to and disillusioned many in the past. He also commented that his prior approaches to statistical analysis do not work under most data mining type scenarios today... i.e. they applied to random and exhaustive methods in the past, not so much to modern intelligent based searches.
Reading his book partly was a waste of time. Trying to explain probability and statistics with cartoons is only for commercial purposes. The real problems of trading are with discipline and execution. I could give a system to 100 traders here that I know that it will perform well in the next 5 years and I have such system. The results from the 100 traders will have a distribution with some traders losing a lot and some others making a lot. The results would depend on trader and broker execution, slippage, disciplines, etc. As far as probability and statistics, here is my answer in another thread: http://www.elitetrader.com/et/index.php?posts/4259600/
"The real problems of trading are with discipline and execution." I can only assume your trading "system" is a discretionary trading method. Real systematic (aka mechanical) traders don't have these concerns. So the real problem of trading, discretionary or mechanical, is lack of a consistently profitable trading plan. And if the plan is discretionary (aka non-programmable), then lack of discipline and other concerns come into play. Re statistics: I agree it is pretty worthless for the main problem (creation of the trading plan), but stats are absolutely vital for validating the plan. Any trading with a plan that hasn't been thoroughly backtested will most likely fail.