It really does not matter whether one believes it to be random. It is like ranting how good a team is on paper but they keep losing. All that matters is what happens in the market day to day and it certainly is not entirely random.
Turn a 50 year Dow weekly chart upside down. Then you will see that markets are only partly -not profitable- tradeable. Some stockmarket question to answer: Why are crashes always down and fast? Why is vola rising when market drops? Why is there a crash after market went too high( 29, 87, 00 )? Why is there no big crash when market is in a downtrend? Why is a 1 minute ES chart looking like a random generated chart( hint: How much money in the market is from daytraders ( not counting marketmakers - they just eat slippage!! ))? Is the overall long/short ratio 50/50 or more like 80/20?
Coach--- Anytime you or I put on a trade, it can go either direction. I don't care how many times you've seen the pattern before or what the news is. Each trade is unique and no trade is certain. However, if I understand your first sentence, I too subscribe to the idea that it really does not matter whether one believes the market he is trading is random or is not random. It's whether he wins or loses that matters.
When you make money consistently the market is predictable. When you lose more than you win the market has to be random because afterall, you are an intelligent person, and there is no way an intelligent person can consistently lose money.
Question for you, PTF. Do you believe that human group behaviour is predictable or unpredictable? I won't bother with examples, I think it's pretty obvious that there are recurring situations in which the decisions of humans in groups could be statistically analyzed to see if they were random or not.
A. Because fear is a stronger emotion than greed. B. See A. C. Fresh out of dummies. D. There is. It's called capitulation. E. Because the person who thinks it's random doesn't understand it. F. Can't say. What does that have to do with "randomness"? LC
Hmmm.....very interesting question traderNik. Yes, I would agree that human behavior is very predictible at times. In fact, as I've mentioned before, I'm looking for washout volume at bottoms so in that sense I'm trying to predict human behavior but it doesn't always happen that way. I've seen bottoms occur on light volume. Here's the rub....traders/investors will debate this issue til the cows come home. If you view the market as being technical and you make money OR you view it as random and you make money then there's really nothing to debate. The only thing that matters is making money.
I tend to agree. Markets are randomly deterministic that can be resolved only by some statistically heuristic forecasting models, such as JH's ones.