Well there are some who have trouble remembering their fool ET name and I don't put them in the fool classification. No fooling!
haters: whatever it is that everybody starts to use and becomes very popular, i.e indicators which have worked but stop to like ema, rsi, stoch, there will be bigger money going against this strategy and getting everyone out of their positions. or for example when EVERYBODY in et was short the eur/usd at probably on average 1.23's (maybe you had stop losses) and all woke up to find there was a huge (3 cent) overnight short squeeze. these are both methods which were based on backtested data: info from the media, charts with all kinds of fancy designs and stuff. there is nothing consistent anymore, the market is run by machines which are programmed by quant analysts who make their money figuring out which way the market(retail traders) is the weakest/strongest and constantly adapting to change to whichever way the other 'big money' i.e other computers are going. XLF down 2.5% early today because the 'market machines' saw how many sell orders there were at market on open, they joined the party seeing that consumer sentiment was weak, making it worse, then releasing some kind of disappointing numbers at 10 oclock which got even more retailers to dump their shares(wall street controls cnbc, bloomberg, cnnmoney etc...). the fas/xlf and market in general were not selling well around their lows because the retail 'bargain hunters' were coming in to buy or shorts were taking profits, which caused the machines to adjust and get long on all positions for a couple hours as the market was trending. everyone assumed this is a real rally, jacked up prices some more, then after such a bullish run all the machines took their profits without killing the price too much cause of all the limit buy orders set below them in such a strong run. these days every day is different from what used to work. it's different competition, were playing against robots designed to shake you out of positions, the only way to win is to try to understand the day to day psychology of how the market is programmed and moving with the 'market machines'. it's all about minute by minute price action to be able to keep up and catch the right side of the move. that and trading 3x sector etf's; finance, tech, s&p... they are always fairly priced, it is not like a stock which doesn't go up with the market because of technical issues. that's it, it's all about the present.
âIâm jumping up and down and telling my dad to buy it,â Hintz said of Goldman Sachsâs stock. http://noir.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aUuUmm_02YAw&pos=2 somebody please keep me posted once gs passes $170.
In a nutshell, your opening gambit in the argument that "backtesting is stupid" is to de facto admit that you don't do it. You rested my case for me.