I have seen a lot of widely available systems that actually work.. I have mentioned here that i have read 2-3 books from the 80's whose systems are still performing nice. OF course they sometimes have their down perids ( like 1-2 years of drawdowns) but hey, that's what you get for an "ancient" not-very-optimized system. I do believe that even if i post rules for an extremely profitable system, at the first losing trade everyone is going to turn to the next holy grail...Its just human nature..Greed and fear is name of the game.. There's nothing new under the sun....... Everyone that has read any history knows that.. Good night to all!
None of those 'indicators' mentioned are systems. H&S, Bollinger , are not systems. A system can be executed by a machine or a trader acting like a machine. Everything else is seat of the pants. Systems that are 'automatic' can't survive in the wild very long for obvious reasons.
Systematization: Input (market data) .... System (processing of data) .... Output ("buy", "sell", etc.)
I don't know what you thought I meant so I don't know if I disagree with your disagreement. To add to the confusion I'll clarify. A reliable winning money machine made PUBLIC will not survive for long.
To prove your above statement incorrect I will provide one counterexample. Richard Saidenberg's "R-Breaker" S&P futures trading system was released to the public in 1993. Since that time it has consistently been rated as one of the top ten S&P systems by Futures Truth, as it is presently: http://www.futurestruth.com/topten.htm#S&P Systems Richard
Of course, it's a relative matter. The more liquid your market, the greater tolerance your system will have for multiple users.
So you use this system and make good money. Congrats. Oh, by the way, if you release 1000 systems , do you imagine that all of them will fail at the same time, or ever? The trick is to figure out the ones that won't fail before you lose your shirt. But since you've been on that roll since 1993, you don't have that problem!
http://www.mechanicaltrader.de/randomequity.htm Go play with this equity curve simulator using nearly random but nontheless edge containg ratios such as win/loss ratio of 1.01 and trade probability of 50%. You can see that even with an edge there are some sample runs which produce losses. Does an edge ever go away or does it just hit a bad "sample run"? Of course if one cranks up the ratios, i.e. creating a stronger edge, it is almost impossible to produce a losing run. I believe some successful, long lasting systems dance at the edge of non-randomness and manage to shake off less confident and less capitalized adherents during random periods of seemingly non-edge performance.