great...you have listed 3 items which are arbitrary and undefined. a. i buy at the bottom what ever that means b. Consistent performance for years..how do you measure consistency..and for how many years? c. growing rapidly and profitable...again..what is growing rapidly...and how profitable. i will ask another question...what is you MONEY MANAGEMENT STRATEGY...señor "i have been trading for years".
I think he sets mental stops for each stock at 0, and if the stock looks like it might go up too much he immediately sells for fear of making a profit.
a. When the nasdaq breaks below its normal trading range as we have seen in the past 2 months. It isnt an exact science where the bottom is. b. The companies I have chosen have shown increasing revenue and profit. c. Stock has outperformed the major indexes by a very large margin. Nice..AAPL reorted great eanrings..up 9% in AH which puts me at break even for that stock (for now atleast)
still completely arbitrary "outperformed major indexes by a large margin" Which indices, what margin, how large. are you using Alpha, beta? what is your Measure? Read oneil for a good example of how to measure these things. or do a search for CANSLIM. Much more important than this is a money management strategy...do you have one of those?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- What a discretionary trader loves is the excitement. He loves being âin the markets,â playing with the big guys. He craves the risk, the excitement of trading, and the gambling rush that he gets from calling his broker and putting in the order to buy. He loves being able to sell Gyro Corp. based on the news story of the health hazards of their top selling Gyrometer. He has a real obsession for buying Cotton based on the hot tip from his broker that the upcoming crop report was going to be bullish, and he covets the tip from his friend who called to say that he just bought Techno Corp. because the latest quarterly earnings were going to be a surprise on the upside. Discretionary traders retain the flexibility of changing their buy and sell criteria from moment to moment, and change they way they trade from minute to minute and day by day. âWell, that last trade was a disaster, so tomorrow I will buy McDonaldâs only if it opens up from yesterdayâs close.â They donât have any discipline, nor do they think they need any. They use their intuition and their gut instinct, and feel justified in doing so. They think, âMaking money is easy, you just have to be smarter and quicker than the next guy.â I personally donât know anyone who has made money by discretionary trading. They may have been lucky and won on a few trades, but overall, over time, discretionary traders always lose money. It is after enough money has been lost that the discretionary trader in some way stumbles across technical indicators. It may be from the chart book he just looked at where there was a Stochastic Indicator underneath the chart. Or he may have gone to the latest Make a Million Dollars Trading the Stock Market seminar and found out that using the Relative Strength Indicator is the sure way to stock market profits. He thinks, âSo this is how they do it!â These indicators look like magic. They add some rationality to an otherwise irrational trading style. He thinks, âThis must be how the big money players make the big moneyâthey use technical indicators!â -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This is a bunch of Bull Shit. Jim Rogers, George Soros, Julian Robertson, Warren Buffet, Franklin Templeton, William O Neil, among many others used a mostly discretionary format to build there wealth. You can be an idiot trading fundamnetals or technical analysis. I personally trade only off fundamentals and will only pay attention to charts if the trade is obssesing about something. I think technical indicaters are 95% fradulent and most traders will not make money using them. It seems that they are used to trick the masses into thinking that trading is easy because there is no need to understand the economics/structure of the product they are trading.
Jho's post makes a lot of sense to me and I think it does for all self learning traders. The 8-page post, IMO is one of the best pieces of read in this forum.
LMAO. Fraudulent technical indicators? Indicators reflect what has happened in the past. They are not fraudulent. They are not guaranteed to do anything other than reflect what has already happened. There is no conspiracy. Everyone is not out to get you. No one is forcing anyone to use any indicators. Most indicators have been around for quite some time or are variations of older indicators. Most of them have a useful purpose, but they should not be the only criteria used in selecting a stock.
As a side note, EVERY INDICATOR we have was someone's attempt at finding the holy grail. If that is not proof there is no holy grail other than money management, I don't know what is.
By fraudulent, I mean these indicators are represented by companies/individuals to make you rich if you follow them and ignore a lot of other information. I would love to see the stats on how many retail traders are failures using just technical indicators.
Since only 5% of all traders consisistently make money in the market I don't think it makes much difference what system they use.