What looks as nonsense to one person can be very valuable information for another person. It all depends of how smart or stupid one is to believe or understand what is told. One should always be carefully in reading advice or interpreting performance from others. Even if his name is Marketsurfer. So be carefully with everybody. I always avoid people who think of themselves that they know everything and the rest of the world is wrong or stupid. I also avoid people who say that their own journal had overall positive reactions. One should never say how great his own "performance" is, leave this to others. That will make things also less arrogant.
It also helps to post a trading plan so that those who are interested can test it out for themselves. Something MS has never done. Because he doesn't have one. Believe nothing other than what the market tells you. Trust nothing other than what the market tells you. "Judge the market by its own action." While you may not understand what it's telling you, it does not lie.
Honestly, I loved and hated Brooks when I started reading his book, Reading Price Charts Bar By Bar. I loved that his book described something I thought I was onto as a novice, which was trading with either a 3-min or 5-min chart and a 20-EMA, but I hated how difficult it was to figure out what the heck he was talking about. I'd spend an hour studying a few pages each night and often had to move on without any clear understanding of what I'd read. I'd been trading a little over a year when his book was recommended and after a month or so working my way through it, I posted in my journal: "If you're a beginner, you may as well just place the book under your pillow at night because you'll get as much out of it that way with less stress ;-)" It wasn't until much later that I started studying it again and knew exactly what he was talking about. I now understand Brooks fully. I don't necessarily trade the same way because I've incorporated his ideas into my own plan, which is a mixture of Brooks (5-min chart) and Volman (1-min chart) and myself (entry methods and trade management). I mentioned Lance Beggs because a friend of mine studied his course and described it and it sounded like an excellent price action based course of study. Price action concepts will be basically the same. These concepts are based on zones of support and resistance and ways to profit from certain price behaviors around those levels, while significantly limiting risk. Your own study and analyses will be key in developing a plan, but these price action books and courses can offer you insight into high expectancy setups, thereby saving you the task of re-inventing the wheel from scratch. There is nothing "guru" about it; it will be many hours of hard work taking profitable concepts and turning them into excellent execution of a thoroughly tested trading plan. Many aspiring traders come to understand the concepts and can often nail price movement to the tick. Many more take this understanding and develop a high expectancy trading plan for profiting from it. Very, very few master the execution of their own plan.
Be careful, DA, Surf is a writer and profits from writing about the markets. Posting on ET helps him market himself. There's nothing mysterious about "price drivers". It's exactly what it sounds like - external factors that create a supply/demand imbalance and consequently drive price movement in a particular direction. Price drivers can be geo-political events, rumors, news releases, key support/resistance levels, indicators, etc. Surf writes about the markets and includes charts and technical analyses in his articles. Here are some quotes from his articles: "A look at the technical picture shows GME has plunged below the support line of the 200-day simple moving average to find support at $36. The price has since bounced directly below the $38 level where a breakout entry point has formed." "A look at the technical picture shows shares have gapped up on the better-than-expected fourth quarter and strong 2014 guidance. The 200-day simple moving average should act as support and a stop level for long positions." What he's describing is pure technical analysis of price action. He's a consummate marketing professional in that he understands the power of attracting attention, which is more easily done by negative commentary here on ET than by positive commentary (such as actually explaining what "price drivers" are). Bro Surf, XXXOOO, as always
So, in other words, NoDoji, you could give me your trading plan, but if I haven't done the work and learned the concepts and purposefully observed price action with the intent of understanding how price behaves and the various contexts in which it occurs, I'd likely fail, correct? In other words, while I may get insight into price action from others, there is no way to short cut the hard work.
Sister Doji, XXXXXX00000 Thank you for the kind words, seriously. I use TA to describe price, it is good for that. But there is a difference between description and prediction. peace, surf
I agree wholeheartedly. Consistently profitable traders predict only the odds of price movement on any given trade, not the movement itself. When I enter a strong trend, I can predict the odds of continuation off my entry level are NN%, but I have no idea whatsoever whether that particular trade will be one of those NN% winning trades.
When I started out, a trader not only told me his plan, he told me his plan for every trade, every day, called in advance. He made a huge profit that year. I could not bring myself to pull the trigger on ANY of those trades. I could give you my plan, with its explicit rules for entry and trade management, and I doubt you could bring yourself to follow it. Maybe after a few months in a sim account you could. Maybe not even then, depending on the psychological baggage you're carrying the from the sum of your life experiences.
Actually, you have, or at least more so than you may have thought. And there have been more than a few people who've tried to "follow it" without having done anything more than read your posts. Without having done any of the work, they buy any retracement they see using the 5/1 and of course they fail. Why is this a subject of continual surprise?