"becuase it always, and 100% of the time generates some profit" That's a prediction because moments can occur in the market (a major unexpected news event say, a large buyer in a thin market) that will rule even the most certain certainty wrong that time.
But it is affected by news? And where was it said that Jack's 100% certainty is limited to S&P? Its interesting to have a 50 page long argument between those who understand the english language, statistics, and the world and those who deliberately deceive themselves for a functional reason and then lose the ability to perceive their deception. The brain is a wonderfully plastic thing.
Here' I've redone your matrix so that the trader only looks at conditions and then takes appropriate actions. This involves no concept of prediction but rather reading a condition and actively responding with the correct action. If responding to a condition - or change in that condition - is the same as prediction, well then, according to this definition, everyone "predicts" everything (put food on stove, stove is lit, so I predict food will cook) / (driving in car, light is green, so I predict traffic will continue in the same direction) / (picking up pen to write / paper is clear and ink is flowing properly / i predict i will be able to write a letter). Good trading doesn't require any anticipation (even though you might want to) or prediction, it only requires interpreting and responding to information with the correct action Good trading, JJ
Mkt needs to be very liquid, otherwise you get random prints and random volume (IE like stocks with their late prints) that will definitely skew data. Spyder will have to answer the question about random news events.
Jimmy, As per the op's definition you are just a robot system operating within the designers prediction based framework. Operationally your beliefs may be useful but to deny the presence of prediction is just self deception. Useful to you but no less present.
The three skill levels of trading look like this: Novice or beginner: about 7 holds a day. Intermediate: 7 to 15 holds a day. expert: 20 to 40 holds a day. The trends overlap and the beginning of the overlap is signalled by a data set. The log notation for the data set conclusion is "change". This moment causes a person to ACT. The Action is a reverse. An expert is in the market all of the time almost without exception. Rockets were nice traverse that had a nice characteristics; as used in PVT they give nice results in one day. In SCT they appear a couple of times a day as traverses of the channels that have the beginner FTT's in them. Ice bergs kept people from "freakout" trading. And they were oriented to the "sentiment" of the market. Luckily, they let people relax a little throughout the day. When you get on up to frequent trades like 20 to 40 a day, you are only in a position for 10 to 20 minutes on average. This is brisk and 2 to 4 bar hold come into the picture. (5 minute bars) How does a person keep up if he has only 10 minutes to take care of business during RTH's. If you look at the other forums here where scalping is going on, you do see more frequent moments of holding to get some degree of profit. We do not do this and those that do often use few elements in their data sets. This can be like "freak out" trading in many ways. As 2007 goes by we are going to take trading up to expert level in both SCT and PVT. a thread has begun where a person entered got 8 ppoints ahead and rode down 5.8 pionts and exitied and then from the side lines watched the market go back up 5.8 points. he got many pages of posts on how much money he made that day, all in response to his query. I pm'ed him that it looked like the potential was about 20 points. A sum of 8 +5.8 +5.8. The general response was that he made about 2.3 points. He saw the tops and bottoms. He entered and held through a top and exited on the next bottom and sidelined for the price move after his exit. The market range may have been 8 points with three traverses of 8, 5.8 and 5.8 points each. This is a beginner level of trading that involved less than 7 holds. It was just three holds with two "changes". for an intermediate each of the "legs" of the beginner would be broken into parts where the sum of the parts is greater than the whole leg. lets say and odd number for each to be reasonable and not change the original leg actions. Now you see 9 sub segments that add up to more that 20 points. What value above 20 points should be chosen to represent what is on the table? 21 would be too low. 30 would mean that the segments would be in the range of three points each. That would be too much probably to make the example a real one for most people. The most vociferous people on this chosen value would express anger. eight limiting values would have to be picked in one day and that is way out of the box. For experts we would see that for most of the segments of the legs 1 to 3 trades would occur. do half and half with a slight favoring of further breaking. This ramps the total holds up to 22. The sum of these would be above 30 and would range from 3 points down to about 2 or 3 ticks as minimums. When did all this happen? For me it is a four page log that has about the same stuff on each page. That me a person like me could probably print roughly filled in logs, foru pages each, in sets of 25 for each month a month in advance. This is quite far from "freak out" trading and scalping. The idea of tops and bottoms may be appearing in some reader's minds. caryola is there for others. What internal formations am I holding through: stalls, and hitches and most dips. What internal formations am I trading: all pennants, All HVS The cycling of CCC: slalom the congestion, slalom the convergence and do the centering BO. All tops and bottoms. These include the FTT's on three levels of channels, NO BO's sincee they are intrmediate points between FTT's and FBO's.. Points 1, 2, and 3, where 1's are FTT's and 3's are FBO's. Mostly all "changes" are data sets that have formation and annotations ID's. Annotating is like a dual purpose efort and I have data seets flowing in a steady stream where the routine in step four always gives me closure so I can start over. The beginner has a small conclusion set and his data sets have few elelemts each. No freak out here. The MODE is continue and change. You can see trader666 got as far as column one and two and he only blew column three. Todd "fixed" him and his thinking for just a moment in time, then he went back to his world and let our world. The beginner is striving to do change on time. he missed to one side or the other but finally gets it straigt over a month or two. At 20 points a day it is okay for himn to work this way for two months. he can add contracts occassionally as we see. He has profits for that. The intermediate takes on larger data sets (you will see these show up soon.). He actually does more trades as he gets more "tops and bottoms" in the picture. They are preceeded by the leading indicators of price so he sees these in his data sets and knows the beginnings of the rhythms of the markets. It is not heavy metal but more like a foxtrot or waltz. Things go to fine control for the expert large data sets and he tangos and does the NY Lindy. The data sets are not like a combo playing but more like the Big Band era. Zoot suit with reet pleat stuff. This all befudles those over the line in conventional orthodoxy. That is just the way life turns out for these people. Just call it junk.
No, he is correct. Whether the individual trader can capitalize on that profit, or chooses to hold the position too long until it becomes unprofitable (but no doubt, generating a set of conditions which will then result in the opposite position) is up to them, but not only is there a 100% certainty of some level of profit, but as measured over-time, there is 100% certainty of profit, period. Good trading, Jimmy
Fine kiwi, In that case: I predict the sun will rise tomorrow. I predict I will get a cup of coffee. I predict I will go to work. JJ P.S. I'll drop by Monday to let you know how the predicitons went.
Really? Then tell me how you learned what the "correct action" is for a given circumstance? Answer: from observing the PAST, and seeing what the market HAS DONE under certain circumstances. And when you place a trade, you do so because you see a circumstance similar to one you've seen in the past and you're PREDICTING that the market will behave in the FUTURE as it has in the PAST (or nearly so). You can pretend you're not predicting but you're just fooling yourself.