Borish's market call and prediction was off by a huge magnitude actually-- as documented in the film. Surf
I'm really more interested in personality types and beliefs about economic ideas. Have you sorted out your Myer's Briggs Type by any chance?
Charts/visual TA are appealing to artistic, visual, touchy feely subjective types. Whereas true quant tactics appeal to the scientific objective math types. Wonder why the public use charts and TA almost exclusively? There's your answer.
I agree with this. It's not to say that intuition is always wrong or scientific reasoning is always correct... but for the most part its true. TA seems like pseudoscience... combination of "gut feeling" and questionable analysis of probabilities/statistics. It amazes me how you can take x amount of traders and show them the same exact chart and hear x conclusions. If you narrow the results to bullish/bearish/neutral, each trader has a 33% of being accurate. How much skill is involved in interpreting charts? Am I wrong to say that analyzing a chart is very subjective? Are there experts in TA? Apply a oscillator/indicator on a pattern and then the bullish/bearish pattern gets reverse (e.g. no volume = failed breakout). Look I'm not here to insult TA. I have a curiosity about it. I personally use price action in my trading although I am suspicious of patterns, moving averages, indicators, etc. I mentioned Victor Niederhoffer earlier... I like his approach to trading but I try to incorporate better risk management moves (i.e. hedge against tail-risk... if the hedge, usually options, is too expensive I just don't put the trade on). I've recently day traded the ES without a hedge but I trade off % moves and used historical price data as a guide. Obviously I prefer to go counter-trend and I am not a chaser. While I try to pick short-term bottoms & tops my second risk management tool is to draw a line in the sand at a price level if I am wrong (use a mental stop but am disciplined) as well as a % of my account. I'm aggressive and will risk 10% on ES trades. Futures are choppy and if I traded stocks (say mid-caps or less) I would have tighter stops as those things tend to trend (or go bankrupt and worthless). You now have an idea of my strategy. For what its worth I traded for a prop firm for 2 years and I was actually paid a tiny draw to do so in addition to my P/L. I quit when I was offered an opportunity I couldn't turn down at a VC firm. It seems as the best traders used relative strength and/or momentum plays. A lot of $ was made in the pre-mkt and after hours. Prop trading is very difficult though because you're expected to trade everyday and that just wasn't my thing. I wasn't content being a gross trader, especially discretionary, and living paycheck to paycheck is frustrating because you're usually at the mercy of the market (lack of volatility isn't good). It's tough to be patient on a trading desk and just sit there. And of course management just want's you to scalp something. Prop trading is not as rewarding as it used to be in the 1990s... I've heard this from countless traders who made $ back in the day and are now satisfied making very low 6 figures. These guys trade millions of shares to get a sub one penny return. Hopefully we can stick to TA and not personally attack each other for the wrong reasons.
Many people wrote on this subject, some very intelligent and highly skilled. If I see a pattern repeating every day, then I know that "markets are not random". If you don't see any pattern you just don't know if markets are random, or if it's you who can't find any pattern. Isn't it?
I did this kind of simulations, but they just prove that the way you're using a certain indicator is not useful. It doesn't say anything about markets' randomness. It's a problem similar to the black swan.
AltTrader: You should test your implicit supposition that "two time series that look similar were generated by the same underlying probability distributions". You should also learn to test for serial dependency in a time series, which is a problem for many because they only know autocorrelation.
These don't look like the kind of charts a real trader would ever use. Generate charts that have bars with OHLC and volume.
not really but intresting you mention it. howd you rate ? i think we all on here have alot of similarities. though we are different, compared to the rest of the world we are more similar than different