How many years have you been trading? Markets are doing what they always do. Taking money away from most of it's participants. Nothing new here. If everyone were making money then nobody would complain then would they?
you are basically watching chop in action. no need to trade it sit out and hang out w/ friends. its close to not being chop though, maybe 2-3 days more
Not sure what the number of years has to do with things but almost three decades. How long have you been trading? And what does that have to do with the question? I note that people complain through good times, bad times, happy times, sad times, etc. etc. So you make a good point. Although I have a market feel, it is statistical information I use to back that comment before I trade using the information.
Markets are always changing... been that way since the dawn of organized trading. There never has, and never will be, "the good 'ole days" again because the truth is that what some traders considered "good" was just another phase in a constantly changing structure. In reality, you have to adapt your money management ( stops and profit targets ) and timing ( entries ) at least as much as your core technical or fundamental models. One of the reasons ( besides just a better behaving and modeling market structure ) I like to use spreads for clients is that we have hundreds of spread combinations over several market sectors... this is an advantage over a scalper concentrating in the ES or 6E or CL in the sense that a scalper pretty much is beholden to one market - the concentration and intensity demands it. My preference is to get my clients to a place where they can screen alot of trade set-ups and 'cherry pick' the best risk vs reward set-ups. Spread traders can pretty much make their own markets; in CL alone, just in the forward calendar curve, there are thousands of pair, butterfly, and condor combinations possible out to 2016. I feel this is a real advantage - if you are pretty much bound to one or a few markets, well, you suffer when they don't exactly behave according to your modeling or expectations.
You are quite correct. That is a common reaction by many to the claimed expertise and success of others. On the other hand, if the percentage of folks claiming to have possession of the grail, indeed did, then it would be real hard to find the losers. Real hard.
To quote the wise Lou Mannheim: "Jesus you can't make a buck in this market, the country's goin' to hell faster than when that son of a bitch Roosevelt was in charge. Too much cheap money sloshing around the world. The worst mistake we ever made was letting Nixon get off the gold standard". Truer (seemingly timeless) fictional words have never been spoken I agree with many here that we are in chop and so if your game is not in chop then sit on those hands.
Your points are very well taken. For myself, I don't care what others claim here or anywhere. I need to do it for myself to use what I read. Even if there are people questioning my comments that I am pretty sure have no clue at all, I listen and if their point interests me I use it after I research it myself. Therein lies one secret to success, there is no way around it, you need to do your own work in the markets and not attempt to "steal" free ideas. You get what you pay for like anything else in life. On the other hand, through the years some powerful traders have helped me with little comments here and there that got me thinking. I owe them and feel an obligation to contribute back to the future traders. I can tell you that I have never found a holy grail, but I can out-trade many many people as proved by my profits through the years. Those also have cycles. There is no profit for me to show any proof to anybody unless they give me something valuable in exchange. If someone doesn't like what I say, then simply don't read it. As an expert trader, I can tell just by reading a few posts the likelihood that the person knows what they are talking about. That was the same when I was an expert chess player in the 1980s. We should all learn while having a built-in fail-safe crap detector as Hemmingway (?) once wrote. However, as desiderata says: Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story. and If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself. Just my two cents worth and thanks for your comments and to all those who force me to think a little more!
You really think that getting on the right side of market direction has anything to do with smarts? .................. Let me repeat, you will never, ever, ever, ever, never, ever be able to predict the direction of anything 100% of the time. Therefore, risk managment is the most important part of trading. Even if you say you are trading directionless, this is meaningless because you still need the price to go in your bet direction to make money, PERIOD!
Market has not changed it goes through sections of chop and trend and back to chop. Running linear equations will show you throughout time the continuity and resolvability of the market and markets overall. I will post few examples later tonight. Good trading to all