I did mean "if, and only if". I define TA as a study. Specifically I mean the study of price movements based on the previous prices. So if price dependence does exist we can use TA to get more information.
It takes 5 men 5 days to dig 5 holes. Therefore, it takes 25 "mandays" to dig 5 holes or 5 mandays for each hole. 10 men and 10 days = 100 mandays 100 mandays / 5 mandays for each hole = 20 holes.
Equivalently, and assuming the holes are all the same size: 5 men take 5 days to dig 5 holes 10 men take 5 days to dig 10 holes 10 men take 10 days to dig 20 holes
Very entertaining thread. But, for those who are able to open their eyes and ears, understand this: The only truth in the market is price. Not some book, not some PM from an ET member, not some squiggly line on the chart, not some bark at the moon. (A footnote: I believe brother Duref does occasionally bark at the moon, but it's unrelated to trading.)
Right! The funny thing is that while lacking basic, high school, algebra skills he attacked this forum as comprised mostly from trolls.
Several people introduced aspects of logic theory here. We found the OP is not disciplined. We also found that the market's operation is not understood in terms of logic. One of the greatest things separating the herd from the specialist is that some specialists use logic only as the foundation of their out of the box successes. In this region of trading, there is little documentation of and by the practioners. Periodicals almost seem to avoid this region. academics missed it entirely. The easieist solution to employing logic to decribe and anticipate market movement (the way in which capital is extracted) is to replicate the market's operation by using logic flow sheets. Again a person has to have some education in logic. If or only If was proffered and corrected. Maybe, there is a narrow window of correct usage of logic here. Who knows, it doesn't get used at all which is telling. In logic, the most important technical aspects are filtering, gating and kills. More important is record keeping. The shift to logic occurred at about the same time the DOW theory was introduced for common information sharing. But there were no computers then. Computers and markets both dictate the use of a common math. This algebra simplifies all trading. As usual, the laziest approach became more common (using averages of data sets) and algebra did not get very far into the heard's reasoning processes. PC's were invented recently. As a consequence languages drive hardware and not vice versa. When all is said and done, the markets operate in a mostly counterintuitive way. The only significant orientation for taking the markets full offer is to be parasitic, front running and technical. This means the minority is always correct. This is hard for the herd to get used to so, evidentally, there is no known method that has been introduced that has expired because of general adoption. Currently, the financial industry is using induction and this means larger and larger data processing capability and the use of post doctoral massagers. In geology this is called making clay. Therefore, by using deduction and algebra, the hugeness of markets assures a 100% corrolation of the parts and the result is no noise, no anomalies and no flaws. 53 years of use (inductive reasoning..LOL) suggest than no adjustments are ever required and broad usage (although it will never occur) would not denigrate the system. Start in the middle. The test of the system is that you discover and handle logically all of the trend's finite cases. As a compare and contrast of the CW to the deduced logic system, the most glaring contrast is the classification of signals. The older signals of CW were the best. The newer CW signals "morph". LOL. Logic signals are what leads to a fully differentiated system. All all logic signals occur in NOW or ahead of NOW. Logic reduces the precise narrow requirement set by the market to a singularity before the singularity occurs in NOW. In most of the fields I work, I have always kept track of the hounds chasing the fox. Our living room has a gray fox with a forepaw resting on a small raised log. He is alertly gazing into his habitat to see what's up. He sees that not much logic is being learned and a lot of scientists are ditching science to make clay out of the wrong signal data.
"Woof woof" in agreement. But will add timudly that volume may have a mite (an ear mite) to do with it. But not in the ways that Jack teaches.
I liked the 2 x 2 = 4 (The new multiplier of the normalized fact.) The shortcoming of the test problem is that, through errors, a correct solution can appear. 2 + 2 as Jamie Dimon would say "also morphs" into 4. I used to discuss the SAT's with ETS. They wre convinced the tests meant something but they didn't. LOL How many people can shange the aptitude of others? Not many people work that turf. My approach was to reverse the learning roles. What if the OP had to ask Q's to shift his present aptitude? In 10 years of a 100% sample of my creation we showed a 1.23 signa shift pre/post. Naturally, it ws through their most dense population on the gaussian LOL
Your conclusion does not follow from your premises. To get to the core of this, as jcl, another member, said in another thread, series autocorrelation is empirically measured to last for up to 4 bars. I say maybe up to 10 bars. Then it vanishes. It is then unrealistic to expect patterns formed over long periods in daily or weekly or even monthly charts to convey any information about the future. TA is a very broad subject. Some aspects of TA may work well, like support and resistance, price patterns, some algos using price, volume and open interest, even trendlines when properly drawn and used for very short term forecasts. Chart patterns - things like triangles, double bottoms, head and shoulders, rectangles, etc. formed over many bars, weeks or even months cannot convey any information because the autocorrelations at the start of these patterns change continuously throughout their formation and information is lost. Thus, these patterns are random in the best case. According to this view, any books that still mention such formations as viable signals are in the best case pranks. What they do is showing the formations that worked and not the numerous ones that did not. This is selection bias. Both wrong and even unethical.
I agree that selection bias is wrong. However, one of the ideas behind technical analysis, is that people are irrational so they respond with how the market is responding. If something is getting sold, they sell in fear that it will continue dropping and buy when it is rising, because of greed. There are booms and crashes and fundamentals never completely correct this, they just oscillate around them.