indicators (ma, macd, stoch...) which are price derivatives lag. they always will - there is no other possibility - modify them for the rest of your life if you want. the above statement woul be like saying "i modified the universe and therefore..."
Make all the fun of Jack you want to (I do so myself), but be aware that there is a huge core of truth in what he writes. I went down his rabbithole three years ago with the treasured map to SCT but without a flashlight. I got so turned around that I didn't know up from down or left from right. It got so bad that I hallucinated Grace singing to me: "One pill makes you larger And one pill makes you small, And the ones that mother gives you Don't do anything at all. Go ask Alice When she's ten feet tall. And if you go chasing rabbits And you know you're going to fall, Tell 'em a hookah smoking caterpillar Has given you the call. Call Alice When she was just small. When the men on the chessboard Get up and tell you where to go And you've just had some kind of mushroom And your mind is moving low. Go ask Alice I think she'll know. When logic and proportion Have fallen sloppy dead, And the White Knight is talking backwards And the Red Queen's "off with her head!" Remember what the dormouse said: Feed your head. Feed your head. Feed your head." When I finally stambled back out into the light, I viscerally understood the meaning of the word "heuristic". And inspired by testing bits and pieces of Jack, I went on to develop things which work. So I am a firm believer in paying close attention to what he writes. But I'm not smart enough to do what he does (I need to be able to trade seriously impaired by hangover and hair of the dog), so I had to find simpler ways to accomplish the same thing. For example, this morning there was what Jack calls an HFS in NQ. I cheerfully scalped the BO for a couple of bottles of Gloria, which is something I would never have done before reading Jack. I didn't trade just because there was a BO, but because I could see before it happened that it would succeed well enough to be profitable for the 54 seconds I was in it. Beware: Jack lives in the tonal. The nagual is where it's really at. Take it from an old hippie, which I doubt Jack ever was. (BTW, here lampooning Jack, my credentials are that I will be 75 in 159 months.)
Let me do one for you. Arithmetic is use in indicators, largely. There is a little algebra that lets a person add and delete as time goes by. At any moment an indicator is able to communicate a value to the viewer. The reception of the viewer varies. Sometimes, for convenience, people look at the value of an indicator in a context. This is where some fish can be fried. What would happen to a viewer if he where to look at the value of the context? What is the value of having a context to view an indicator value? It ranges from nothing to "hey, that's terrific". For me, I even go as far as making up indicators and I call it coding. You may be able to imagine that I can really get inspired and tailor a indicator to make it tell me things. What I mean is, if I need an answer to any question, I get it by making up some code that gives me what want. Actually I do not do the code I only give the criteria or it because I would never be seen again if I started to code. I did do that the one time in my life where I had to make mainframes work when the regular guys didn't. You have an absolute viewpoint on indicators. My view is that anything that is needed can be created and it happens all the time. I am a happy camper. Lets take the slow process of making money position trading high beta stocks. What do I need to make money. A list of them. A trigger for entry and an exit trigger. NTRI is the example we can use here. It does 30% in three days periodically. Four trades take 12 days and the inital capital has become 2.86 times the first entry value. We made 286% on our capital in 12 days. Take 100,000 dollars of intial capital and in 12 days of doing 4 3-day trades we have 286,000 dollars in the account. Now we look and see just what indicators were designed and put on the display to do this. Lets say I bill for the hours to get the indicators done. 10 dollars covers it. The list is constructed using price, volume and FA. FA is a lagging by a quarter type data. Who cares. So you win on the this and the selection we do use lagging FA data and we look at 6 months of P, V to determne the stock is a robot. 30% net robot. The nitty gritty requires that I watch he stock to be able to get in, hold and exit. We sort by score to do that. The scoring is just to get a list a couple of times a week to set up a batting order. NTRI makes the batting order along with 11 other stocks all group in three's as batting orders for four streams of money. I add two pinch hitters. I have the lists from stocktables.com and the list is 7's at the top, 0's in the middle and 1's at the bottom all sorted by incresing% volume to get them listed. This is not lagging it is leading for the 0's and 1's. What the heck happened?? We sorted stocks to get lists and set up batting orders for stocks that are going to be bought, held and sold soon. This is what is going on in the world all over the world and the sun never sets as people are doing this. Now we are sitting in a place where we have the week's trading all set up. Who cares if a person can or cannot do this. Some do. Some don't. I do it. You don't do it. I do it because it can be done. You do not do it because it can't be done and so you don't do it. I sit watching the market open with my stocks listed on a list. I also have charts for each with indicators and price and volume. I occassionally block out the price in real live trading sessions and trade the stocks. I do not need price to trade stocks. There are vidieos of this and there are transcriptions of those vidieos thatare illustrated accordingly to make the point. I am trading off indicators and volume as said above. I have heard from some people that they do not trade as I do. Some feel that it is a skill issue others fell it is a knowledge issue. No one feels it is an age issue. You are an excepton, you do not trade this way because you do not believe it is possible. Videos and documentaton of real events will not change your mind either. To you this is as hard as creating the universe or something. For me it is a fact of life and it buys anything I want. As I look at my screen and the batting order. I see a leading indicator of price go to work for me and in several places. I see the Stoch 5, 2,3 fast line (blue for me) go up through 50%. It is a leading indicator of price and it tells me one thing only. Sentiment has shifted from Distribution to Accumulation. For you it says nothing. I did not look at 50% as a value either. I look at a line tha as the future moves into the preset, rises from distribution to accumulation. Secondly I look at volume after I see this move of the blue stoch fast line. When any of my sorted stocks coe up to bat, their prior volume is in Dry Up (DU). On my list they are sorted by "unusual volume" (a programmer's naming of a variable, reluctantly because he was told to come up with some arithmetic). every day every stock starts at 0. I sort the list by this column. It is a leading indicator of price column. It is a value that is the % of the 65 day average volume. I do not want to use 65 day av but I have no choice in the universe at this point in universe building time. The name of the column could be entitled"fast money making" as far as I am concerned. I allso look at the volume on my chartswhere a ray is implanted at the DU level. I know that as the volume picks up it wil at some point cause price to begin to over. So I put a ray on the volume chart to indicate a point about 1 1/2 hours before the price will begin to move. i know as volume goes through that level then in an hour or so price will begin to move. this is a leading indicator of price that occurs ATER the STOCH (5, 2, 3) fast blue line goes up through the 50%. You do not understand this and you are no going to change your mind and we o know tha is okay for everyone. I do these things ust for one purpose: to make money an make it fast with high beta sorted stocks that keep repeating this. NTRI did this four timesw and I held it for 3 days ntil I got a leading indicator of price to tell me to sell it. That indicator is STOCH (14,1, 3) fast line dropping bewlow 80%. you think it is a lagging indicator and I think it is the second chance to sell. I have a first chance leading indicator that works better than the STOCH. It is the "unusual volume" again. I have pinch hitters as you saw. If they can bat better, then they go to the plate. If I have spare change around I throw it into rockets that do 15% a day for the day using these indicators. NTRI stepped up to the plate four times in 6 months. NTRI was there for three days and netted 30% or better each time at bat. STOCH (5, 2, 3) got it swniging before volume moved up through DU and before price began to move. Stick with your beliefs and guns. Post as you will. Just do what you want. Indicators turn out to be vectors. You see the arithmaetic as a lagging calculation. the vector nature f an indiator is created by the context of making near time comparisons of before and NOW. People who can grasp this trade accordingly using leading indicators of price. You do not. Stick with your beliefs. With the remaining days of the year beside the 12 days spent with NTRI, the capital can be used for other batters. They are triggered by leading indiactors of price in the same way. A person can look over the trading and see how much money is made day after day and week after week and month after month and year after year. The invention of indicators is relatively reent. when they came along as did things lke the computer, perople took advantage of them. why not? The reason why people do not is in what you say. these people believe that they do not work because it is easy to see from how they are calculated. the inventors of them did not reason as you do to invent them. They id not think as you do to use them. Others use them by not thinking as you do. It is just fine to think as you do but you are at a disadvantage compared to others ho use them properly. It is obvious to absolutelyeveryone that the calculation yield a lagging number. And equally true is the fact that people who use indicators successfully are not looking at the calculated number in isolation. It is true also that tuning an indicator does make the number in isolation lead the advent of price beginning to change to make money. Do not let this post influence you in any way if you don't feel like it. Just keep dissagreeing if you wish.
Perhaps most traders are just like 100-meter runners, some of whom can only see and feel how close nearly to be the fastest in every race.