I was going through an old presentation (from 2010) and I had a slide on "Awareness" and whether you're being honest with yourself and whether you can handle the truth. I had written some notes on the slide which were as follows: A major problem for some traders is a flawed strategy. The flawed strategy is due to incorrect assumptions. The incorrect assumptions are based on inaccurate beliefs. The inaccurate beliefs are often rooted in biases. So check to see if your biases are the main cause of your trading problems. Ken Fisher once said "What do you believe that is actually false?" and "What the heck is my brain doing to blindside me?" Let the market tell you what it is doing. Do not tell it what it should do. It does what it wants and is often not rational. Often it moves in a direction that seems contrary to logic given the economic situation and world events at the time. Therefore, think of the market as completely independent of everything else. "Maximum adversity is the market's number one rule and it is this: The market will do what it has to do to disappoint most traders." (Brent Penfold).
Richard Wyckoff's Studies in Tape Reading was published in 1910 Humphrey B Neil's Tape Reading and Market Tactics was published in 1931. These techniques are as effective if not more so today than they were in their day because we can access much better information on a far more timely basis. Nearly every retail trader who got started after 2000 believes these techniques are old and dated and no longer apply. The median return for retail day traders over any trailing 12 month period is around -36%, and 80% of such traders finish the year with a loss. I mention this because one of them might chime in to tell us that HFT etc. and so on have nullified the edge of these techniques, and therefore to remind you that the opinion of such retail day traders with respect to these techniques is worth less than their negative equity curves.
Good points. The book I have is brilliant, Orline Foster "Ticker Technique: the Art of Tape Reading" 1965 Must-read, especially part two "Getting signals off the tape" Also my article