I realize I'm doing it, yet I can't stop this endless jumping around from strategy to strategy. How did you decide to focus on just one strategy? What made you pick the particular strategy you did?
One day I realized that technical indicators in general don't work in the long run. All you're doing is taking the data in front of you and chopping it up, simplifying it actually. Instead, the best thing you can do is to maintain the complexity of the data and instead looking at it in a way that you have never before and others probably don't. For example, if you have the capabilities to do so, make a chart where each bar consists of data for the last 2 hours of one day and the first 2 hours of the next, then skip the area in the middle, and start the next bar (last 2 hours of that day and first 2 hours of next). Spend some time looking at the ways price reacted in different situations, make a system around that Just an idea; realizing technical indicators were the wrong direction was the biggest step I took in ending my search, hope this helped.
You and I are going to be bashed again, but, as you know, I strongly support this point of view. I simply don't believe that there is enough information in Price vs. Time charts. You've been to my site; you know what I'm talking about! Here we go, watch the religious TA guys crucifying us again!
I think it is person specific. You will reach a stage where you will realize the basic principle behind most moves. I spent one year jumping from strategy to strategy. Read almost every single book. Looked at the principle behind many successful trading methods. Looked at methods of people. I spent one month putting it all together in a spreadsheet. I corresponded with lots of successful traders. In the process, I found a trader , who said stop trading for 15 days and everyday go for a long walk and think about your trading. During the break and the walk lot of things started falling in place. I came back after that break with lot of clarity and a plan. Subsequently I developed a set of trading methods which I have been trading profitably. In my plan I have set aside time for R&D and do look at new trading systems but don't necessarily trade them unless they are superior to my system.
I'm not a TA Guy, my model is a quant model but deterministic and above all fundamental one (by fundamental I mean based on economics reasoning not on psychology of crowd because it is just unmodelisable if I wanted to cope with the crowd) as opposed to 99.999% of stochastic or quantumic-like models - btw since I talk so often about EMH I will say that EMH contains the root of truth but only the root not the total tree of thruth : they lie by telling a semi-truth that's why I call them propagandists - but it confirms that TA Guys are not so religious, at least no more no less than those who think that they are in the truth to be non-TA .
I have been following your posts for quite some time now and I have developed a great respect for your knowledge and methods that you implement. I think you are the perfect example that illustrates my point: - Price vs. Time is not enough! And this is the only point I'm trying to make. You, yourself could not disagree with this statement because in your model there is a lot of information that you could not find in the chart. Making decisions based only on the charts is like judging what is going on in the room based on you looking through a key hole.
Don't get caught in the TA v/s non TA debate. That insight is specific to those people. They have arrived at their insight based on their own journey. Focus on the process. Some of the things you might want to consider is modelling yourself on some successful traders. Talk to other traders.
Recognize that learning goes by stages. Once you have your original capital out and spent on your life style, you can get on with moving up the ladder and establishing the total belief system required. That comes after using a low risk simple strategy first. Trade only fast paced trends at first. Almost all trading approaches lead to an expert holistic way of trading.
What you are going through is not at all unusual, and it's part of the process of learning to trade. For most people, learing to trade is, unfortunately, a process of elimination. You usually need to find out what doesn't work, before you finally hit on what does work. It's all about education, and being careful enough with your capital that you give yourself time to learn through mistakes.
Listen to lindq and easyguru. There are going to be all sorts of people telling you to ignore indicators and to ignore systems and to ignore tape reading and to ignore charts blah blah, but you're going to have to find out for yourself what works and what doesn't. This could take months or it could take years depending on how quickly you abandon efforts which aren't panning out. Same with books. Some will tell that such and such a book is the sun around which they revolve. Others will tell you that the same book is a load of crap. But you're going to have to find out for yourself, because one of those books just might make everything crystal clear. If it were easy, everybody would be doing it.