SOLD! anyways couldn't agree more re focusing on price. your clearing firm pays you on price not indicators. this has been said before but it needs to be repeated - why would you focus on a lagging derivative of price when you can focus on price itself? you can tell everything you need to know from price itself. it just takes more time of your ass in the seat watching price action either in real time or in playback mode for traders w/ full/part time jobs. source: trader who used to use indicators but no longer does.
thanks i was going to focus on indicators in the beginning because they seemed easier and simpler, but it seems like most successful people follow price patterns i should make another thread to see if most people are discretionary or mechanical traders i'm guessing most successful ones are mechanical traders and let their systems do most of their trading
Exactly, price is the only "indicator" which has a direct impact on your P&L. Not that you only trade your P&L, you trade your process, but still it makes sense to focus your process on the thing which most impacts your P&L. The only way I could see using indicators is for divergences, e.g. go long when an indicator diverges from price at a low and vice versa at a high. Your stop would then be if price reversed against your trade and "fixed" the divergence. Otherwise, you're always trying to optimize indicator readings and can talk yourself into staying in a trade.
Of course, the Big Dick will say this is a fraud as well. Was posted in the "Engineer looking to make a career change into trading (PART II)" thread just a few minutes ago.
The question always is, why would he waste time consulting someone for a few thousand dollars when he could get it just by trading a few hours (claimed by testimonials). Dealing with people is messy, specially if it's a buy/sell transaction. Do you often hear successful hedge fund managers advertising their services like that? Of course there is always the chance that he is an extremely irrational person.
Oh, I still trade every day. The fact of the matter is that the large percentage of my clients are experienced professional traders, and a few of my clients have made more money by their late twenties than I have made in a lifetime (and they got to that place of course before they hired me). With my experienced clients, there is very much a collaborative process that improves my trading as well. Some of what I now do in my personal trading is derived using client interaction and feedback over the past few years - both individual clients and institutional clients. My trading and the product I deliver to clients is evolving and improving all the time. In my mind, very much a win-win.
I've look at doing this exact strategy in the past and the problem is that i would STILL wait for price confirmation (negative divergence wait for price to go below x for short) and i started thinking "if i'm waiting for a price confirmation before i enter a trade, why don't i just trade off of pure price in the first place". you brought up a great point though re using a stop when using this strategy.