not despairing, I don't trade for living and it's much more of a hobby than an obsession. I'm not trying to take humans out of the equation, it just seems that humans are so full of shit, you couldn't really conclusively tell if a trader is good or bad or having a good year or a bad year, so looking for order in chaos
if you don't believe in repeating patterns then how do you base your decision on what to do with your "smoothed data"? I don't nessecarily believe in technical patterns but I do believe that most people will react in a similar way when they are afraid of losing money or afraid of missing the boat. but haven't found anything conclusive yet, so it could all be wrong, it could be totally random and the only people that are consistently profitable are the assholes on forums who already know everything and have since given up any creative thought, when they win, they win, when they lose, it's because the market is acting funny or something, lol...
"...scour for patterns..." A fruitless never ending quest for something which does not exist. The true quest is to find what the now bar must do as it evolves from the then bar.
....................................................................... damn..... i have been trading this stuff for 35 years that does not work...... why was i not told earlier.......? the market is fractal. get your head wrapped around it the patterns continue in all time frames and the game is all math. i especially hate when a DT setup hands me 140 ticks for a few hours work. cheers, s http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?threadid=223293
Make an application that creates strategies from blank and tries them out. Have as little assumptions as possible. Backtest huge numbers of them, and make sure your trades per parameter ratio is low. Basically that means the entire process of the "quest" is left to the computer. You should no longer be doing the quest, but make AI that is doing the quest for you. It's a cutting edge concept and I'm not sure I should be talking much more about it. It works for me anyway. It works very well indeed. Does that help?
the above = "curve fitting"... The important result is not that the computer manages to find some "good results"; it's that it has to discard "millions" of alternatives to get there. "Survivorship bias"...
Hehe. That kind of thinking is so 2010. It's nice to read stuff like this. Makes me surer I'll keep my edge for a long time.
If you believe the story, I guess you could say Edison curve fit his light bulb design... I know what you mean that you can make data do anything you want, but it probably won't work with another set of data, anyone that only tests with one set of data is short sighted