I admit to sharing the same paranoia. What's even worse, the longer I study this the more it seems that this whole thing may be a function of individual's gift and not a rule based logic. Keep in mind that Spydertrader could trade ES profitably without any of these tools (channels, FTT's etc.) Jack Hershey mentioned somewhere that on the first meeting in Tucson he pulled more than daily range out of ES. Look at Mr. Black who admits to failing today's test on bar 6. Bur did he really? He is extracting from the market like there's no tomorrow, in any imaginable way - FTT's, pt3's, FBO's etc. One thing for sure - he definitely had a lot of screen time. Spydertrader had 3 years of equities and nothing but P/V. If something fails to presents itself in a clear and logical way - it's probably because it is designed this way. And "THEY" know exactly what signal to show to take one's money. Lots and lots of screen time may be the only possible solution.
The feeling I am getting is that everything has become discussion rather than definitive. I posted a question about an annotation two days ago and after hours staring at the situation and reposting that I was making little progress finding a distinction that would lead me to an answer, the question continues to evoke more discussion and uncertainty than solutions and certainty.... and a lot of the time I feel certainty is just a sentence away but it lags for like 30 journal postings and two nights in many cases. I love the idea of stripping everything down to basics...i.e. Monitoring....doing annotations and trying to bring up situations where discrepancies evolve....posting questions....and getting conclusive answers so that they don't come up again and again and again or linger for days on end. This is the direction I thought some of the people recently provided with advice were going in. I turned off my trading platform and I don't hit the buy or sell button anymore. Ive accepted that its back to M as I was told to do. But the more I proceed I find that even with stripped down basic monitoring questions, things go south. And through only about 50 to 75 of the last pages of this journal all sorts of this is right....no this is right....no this is right has evolved. Theres no period on the end of the sentence. So even if it was a good idea to stop monitoring and go back to page 1....the thought of delving into every journal posting again makes me kind of nauseous. The frustration I feel from 75 pages of unsolved debate is enough. Finally the question I ask myself every time I hear start over again is.... Would my questions go away? And the answer is always no.
Come on guys, don't droop. Here is some food for thought from MAK (this is his response to bundlemaker): SIGH... You are wasting your time. Why do you keep failing to do the other half of what's required in this process??? DEBRIEF! This means asking yourself the tough questions. You can post them but cannot expect to get an answer. Long posts require a tremendous amount of time. Your supposedly "tough" questions sometimes, for me, look too obvious, but often I do not posts because I often do not have an hour to spare to answer the questions. Even in school, when you get a textbook, you still find areas that you will consider to be incomplete? What do you do? I know what I did. I sat there, and I thought, and I thought, and I tinkered and reworked the problem and at some point, something clicked. The issue here is why has NOTHING clicked? Nothing at all! Why not even the simple case. You can take a variety of concepts and simplify to a beginner case. Forest level FTT trading... Beginner PRV/STRSQU/P trading... Beginner BIDVOL/ASKVOL trading... Beginner Lead Lag YM/ES trading... Beginner Lead Lag ER2/NQ trading... Beginner Correlation DIA/SPY trading... Beginner ROCKETS trading... a la many EasyRider examples... Beginner Equities trading... Beginner XO Equities trading... Beginner XO Futures trading... Beginner XO Currencies trading... So many different possibilities. Most of these aren't discussed anywhere nor is Jack aware of? How were they realized? Tinkering... And BEGINNING from the simpler components that I understood and then working my way out from there. This is all about skill acquisition. LEARN HOW TO DRIBBLE A BALL. If you can't dribble a basketball, learn to hit a tennis ball. If you can't hit a tennis ball, why not swing a bat, dribble a soccer ball, cycle, swim, run... There are so many different playing fields to try. Why it is that you have pinned yourself to this particular playing field is questionnable and surely you have your reasons. To those that encourage you to ask the tough questions, why do they not ask themselves the tough questions? Nothing here is even remotely close to rocket science. As for sitting next to Jack... I've seen jack nararate on 2 occasions and both times, I found myself to have a very different thought process/loop. At times, I felt I was even more on the ball then what he could nararate. I know Spyder felt the same way on at least one of those occasions. What mattered? Not what Jack was seeing, but what I was capable of seeing. If you are not capable of seeing it, it only cripples your confidence because you will believe that you don't know enough. I say it isn't useful because what I realized was that one could never replicate someone else thought pattern. As soon as the other person is pulled from the situation, you don't just miraculous turn the corner. You still have to do the same process of DEBRIEFING that which you already knew you didn't know. So how many times have you sat next to someone and it gave you the breakthrough you are still seeking (rhetorical)? I suspect that this has not happened since it is now 8 years at being at the beginning step of variuos playing fields... SO the questions is, if you are persisting on doing this beginner iteration a particular way, surely you must be doing something different this time around?! But at what point during your previous iterations did you throw in your hat?... For you, what's wrong with rockets knowing the basics that you know? Why hasn't debriefing answered any of your questions. As for the UNEXPLAINED state, there is an action for that... It is EXIT. If all of your string of sequences contains an UNEXPLAINED state that REQUIRES that you EXIT, well then clearly you don't have any COMPLETE sequences that allow you to trade. Several people talk about how they have a PT3->TRAVERSE->FTT/LTL sequence that works for them. But we all know, that just because someone can dribble such a ball, does not someone else will be able to dribble at all... PS:I'm in the same boat with you.
One more shot from the person with counting issues. The price completed its movement through the 1-2 -3 sequence, but not the movement from point 3 to the signal of change. The bar in question represents nothing else but a retracement of the price after its movement from point 3 into the channel (traverse) on increasing volume. The price still has to complete its attempt to traverse from the RTL toward the LTL of the traverse. <img src=http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/attachment.php?s=&postid=2005663>
I am definitely guilty in participating in what looks like a few people debating subjects they don't have the slightest clue about. At this point I seriously doubt that any answers can be found by posting questions, because they are followed by answers that produce even more questions, with the process expanding exponentially resulting in confusion and frustration. After rereading Spydertrader's advice repeated in slightly different form across multiple posts starting with his post to me on 07-07 I am convinced that it's the best advice he could give for no other reason than the fact that it is most likely how he learned to trade. Reading posts does not help. Doing something is totally different. I have a 120 pages Word document with all Spydertrader's posts on sequences, dominos, and WMCN related subjects which I read and reread a few times. I still can't see any of this stuff on charts, which does not mean it's not there, it only means I have not looked long enough. I have the deepest respect for Mr. Black. Take a look at his charts, do they even resemble the official version. At some point he actually started doing something other than reading. I guess he missed the memo about the M part, because he was too busy trading and making money. But he 'sees' P/V on charts, and that's the only thing that matters. All of the journals are designed to assist someone to become a trader, but the actual journey is very intimate experience, not shared anywhere. The entire humankind got evolved based on trial and error paradigm. Why any of this stuff should be different. Crawl, walk etc. At some point one has to draw some freaking lines, push a few buttons, get screwed, debrief, get screwed in a different way, debrief again. Thank God we have a simulator. IBD members wanted to buy a scanner to record Jack Hershey's eye movements to figure out where and when he looks at the chart. Even he can't explain how he does it.
This is how I see it. Tape is broken on decr. volume so we fan the tape. A fanned tape is a channel regards, Ivo