What is this? The bloods vs. The crips? The jets vs. The sharks? The montagues vs. The capulets? Can't we all just agree that various methods of analysis have various applications and just get along? What is so bad about a holistic approach? Surely then TA has an application in understanding the herds psychology at least. Quit with the childish blanket statements and lets have a grown up discussion about this. What's up TE? You gone shy on us? WTF? What's a faggit? What is this play school or the muppet show?
This is the bulk of the problem about the debates concerning TA. Too many traders mistakenly believe that just because someone is using TA...it implies it's the only thing they are using. In contrast, profitable traders that do use TA aren't using it all by itself. That's also the wall that backtesters run into...they want to test why someone is profitable and discover the trader is not using "one thing only" in the trading plan. They get more frustrated when they realize the profitable trader is arguably putting more emphasis in their own trading plan via things like discipline, market experience, money management, position size management and many other things. TA is the easiest to test but why bother if someone isn't willing to test the entire trading plan? Here's a simple analogy if many reading this still don't understand...pretend there's a book called "Profitable Trading". There's one chapter in the book called "Technical Analysis". Also, the TraderZones, crgarcia types that say TA doesn't work...they are talking about "technical indicators" (e.g. cci, rsi, stoc, macd et cetera). Thus, they don't consider all that other stuff as TA if it's not technical indicators. You can see this because they themselves talk about their use of charts without technical indicators. Once again, profitable traders that use TA are not using it alone and it's just one chapter in their book of many chapters. Last of all, in reference to a comment made by someone else in this thread...I've never had a broker tell me or discuss the use of technical analysis. In contrast, I've heard many sales reps at data vendors (e.g. cqg, esignal, pro realtime, bloomberg et cetera) heavily promote the use of technical indicators to help with trading in an effort to get me to try their software. In fact, just go to any data vendor's website and you'll quickly see the advertising of the so called bells & whistles that comes with the monthly data software subscription. However, can you blame the data vendors because it'll be tough to just sell data all by itself without mentioning all the technical indicators it comes with. Mark
I'm sure if you use ONLY TA you will fail. I'm sure if you use only one way of trading you will fail. Turn off your charts and fly blind, my friend. TA certainly has it's place, but how you define TA is yet, uh..., undefined. Stochs, MA, RSI???? Please tell me. What is your style of trading then, and how have you had success? .........Ironic. Watching the jokers at CNBC right now. Najarian and that other clown had their "Buy dips and sell rips," 30 sec GI JOE-esque tip on. wrbtrader = +1
Kind of my point. I meant if you only used Stochs, or only use Crossing MAs or some sh!t. The naysayers make it seem like there is only one way to use it.
Can you tell me what I should be looking at then, if not charts? Companies fundamentals and PE ratios or something? Im a losing trader and thus welcome advice!