Come on folks. Sir Hypostomus has yet to have his full contingent of aliases (or alii, if you prefer) weigh in on the discussion. Posting prior to the entire choir having had an opportunity to contribute is akin to shouting 'Bravo!' prior to the overture. A little patience please. I plan to pop some corn and enjoy the show. - Spydertrader
Indeed, the marvelous hypostomator was a thing of beauty. Doesn't compare to the fabled "ET" method, but its a solid, standalone work in its own right, and its transcendental nature i'm sure will mollify the truly avant garde hypostimical ecclesiast sect to a degree, certainly, given the truly heuristic, and equinemical approach to a matter so valid and important, as this axiomatic method may appear to be to so many .
Is it just me, or does anyone else feel as though they've walked into a Shakespearean tragedy and the dialog adheres to the emotional and financial demise for all those who 'Quest the Grail?" hmmmm.......must be me.
I'll tell you where the delusion comes from that ET will give you a system. When we were four we learned to count for free, then a few years later we made minimum wage making change for burgers slung. In my case, I subsequently learned to convert base ten to octal nearly for free, and became an instant machine language programmer. Now I troll the digital signal processing literature (also freely accessible) and hoodwink mathematical illiterates with new gee-whiz DSP-based indicators. I mean, anybody who thinks momentum is relevant to prices deserves it. So, sure, ET thinks they can get a system for nothing.
Well, enough on that delusion. Let us now direct our attention to another, equally fascinating and baffling in supposedly grown-up people, the delusion of physicality. As I write the price of ES is 1433.25. Not 1433.pink or fluffy.25. It's a firm numerical value. We use hard numbers to measure time, position, velocity, mass, momentum, volume, pressure, mass flow rate, etc. And the market is characterized by time, price, "volume" (haha!), "depth" (double haha!), "liquidity" (don't make me say it), etc. So there must be something inside there ticking and whirring, right? Huffing and chugging along with mathematically precise (to the tick) predictability. That's how our Joe makes his living, selling us on the idea that a single-order infinite impulse response filter is just the handy-dandy thing we need to get rich. Pay him a little more and he'll custom design an nth-order Kalman filter for you, just for you alone to regale your trading friends. Simply tell him how noisy (manipulative jinking) you think the market is, how laggy your connection is, how much meaurement error (slippage) there is, and voila! A system soundly based in signal estimation theory! The sad fact is that the REAL market algorithms determine where the biggest fools took positions and where their stops are and what it takes to make them doubt and sweat and act impusively.
May I offer a touch of linguistic rigor to the definition of the primary delusion by appellating it The Altruistic Delusion? To clarify that ET is not a helping brotherhood, that brokers do not exist solely to facilitate trading, that data providers do not sincerely want to help you with their choirs of bells and whistles, that the market does not exist solely to make you rich? En bref, that the world of trading is not symbiotic but rather is parasitical?