Last friday? After the fact again? What not make real call in trading day on monday? If you can show that you consistent profit for five days with TA with live call, then all the TA disbelieve here will convert, or else, it is just another after the fact BS call.
If they just tell those money making story, this is easy to deal with, as we all know those are BS. What I hate is they pull up some chart, begin to draw some BS lines - S/R, channel and etc, starting their story on how to buy or sell on those lines with the "high probability" setup and etc. Most of the beginners are fall into this trap.
I like confluence story. It is really convincing. Old school promoted it, especially some Russian emigrant that seem to make money with books. You know newbies will jump on it and sometimes, when bored, I play against them. But is entertainment than anything else and use appropriate size. Regrettably, world is more complex than this. Yes, there is serious computer power available to detect any relationship in markets way before you will.
Actually that is bogus at best and pure guessing at worst. Your definition of a random entry is based on what? Correct, it is based on TA of economic stats, right or wrong that is what economists use to come up with a forecast. If the jobs number has been declining or increasing the economist is "TREND FOLLOWING" those numbers. Same for the weekly jobber claims number. Anything that is random can be herded into a corral (except cats) and then a judgment can be extrapolated from that herd to be used for future reference. PA is just another way to describe what TA is. Economic numbers herding is no different. Life itself is TA, if surf has a 54 inch waist the stats say he eats to much and needs to get more exercise or gobble down fewer turkeys per week. I believe surf is having nightmares how to keep this road show going. Any day now he will be asking for a plea bargain and admit defeat. Surf even admits random selections are based on looking BACK at different pre-selected inputs to make a judgment. THINK TA!! Admit it surf, you have been uncovered. Every single entry in a game of chance is based on some form of TA or another. Steve Cohen tried to beat the system but as always, the cows come home sooner or later. Stevie's cow is gonna produce less milk for sure now, with that, he either joins the TA crowd or just fades away. Teen age boys compare breast sizes in HS, that also is TA ... :eek:
"If you put in stops and run your profits and trade randomly you make money; and if you put in targets and no stops, and you trade randomly you lose money. So the old saw about cutting losses and running profits has some truth to it." -David Harding,Winton Capital http://www.thehedgefundjournal.com/node/7125
It is a cult. Imagine how much $ they make, that they have to spend all their time on the internet convincing others of it. I don't know about you, but if I was making gobs of money from something, I might help out someone here and there and let them know that there is gold to be found, but more likely I would probably be traveling the world, playing golf, reading, dating, driving fast cars, spending time with my wife/kids, instead of endlessly debating that something works or doesn't to anonymous people on the internet, for free no less, who I don't give two shits about. But people want to believe in fairy tales, so beginners flock to threads like this like flies to shit. If it works, it is obvious it does. If it isn't obvious that it works (above random) you are being taken for an intellectual ride. Every beginner has to go through it though because few of us know who to really listen to and can't apply simple common sense to it all. So this thread will go on for another 200 pages, and hundreds more will spring up like it in the future. I know, I have been here for twelve years hearing the same bullshit from the same people, or with new handles. Is there value to TA and PA? Of course there is. But it is not even remotely an edge. What are examples of an edge? Market Making where you are making the spread, arbitrage where the entry almost guarantees a profit. Relative value where statistics bare out over a higher time frame. etc, etc. Almost all of these are played by hedge funds or institutions. TA or PA are things you do AFTER you enter with an edge to try to maximize that gain or contain a loss. I have seen [but never tested myself] a couple of strictly TA/PA patterns that are uncanny and appear to give some statistical edge on entry, but I have rarely seen it discussed on ET. THINK FOR A SECOND: If I could make all this $ with TA/PA, why do the true players continously spend fortunes trying to shave off MICROSECONDS of their datafeed handlers and execution gateways? Are you kidding me?
To stay competitive and increase the edge on the timescale and method they have chosen to employ. Hedge funds and instutitions use complex means of finding and analysing their trades and keeping their risk to a minimum, is that not expected with the amount of capital under managment and position sizes used? You say they use TA after they have entered to maximize a gain or contain a loss, they could do neither using TA if TA did not have the ability to show the market turning in the first place. The typical TA day/swing trader can but does not need to employ those methods, they can monitor several products constantly or just go where the action is.