You r faster than others u know what u r doing ( as a front runner i mean ) otherwise i dont know u well ... Correction
The only reason fireplug posts this drivel is to imply that he has achieved trading nirvana. If you read his posts , you'll realize that he has likely achieved nothing more than living in a mens shelter.
How does the saying go....don't hate the player, hate the game Let's not go overboard here 777, there is a big difference between a system that has worked well for over a decade and total trading 'nirvana'.....why must you always be such a drama queen?
There is clear evidence of repeating patterns that make money for sufficiently long periods of time. But nothing lasts forever. I find this thread too general. A more specific thread would involve an out_of_sample evaluation of the performance of know, fully disclosed patterns in the past. The first time I saw such an evaluation was from pattern guru Michael Harris last week who presented an evaluation of S&P patterns he disclosed in his book 12 years after its publication. In a nut shell, he evaluates three patterns he disclosed in his book and finds out that all performed fine 3 years after the publication although it was a bear market and they were signals for long positions. After 8 years from disclosure, two patterns continued to perform fine and just one broke even. After 12 years to date, one pattern still continuous to perform fine. I think this is something worth reading: http://www.priceactionlab.com/Blog/2011/03/performance-of-three-sp-500-patterns-from-my-1999-book/ I agree with Harris that fooled by randomness is actually coming to believe that there are no repeating patterns in the markets but finding those that persist in time is a tough job and this fact, along with overtrading and poor risk and position management, contributes IMO to the high failure rate for retail traders. This and last year have been the easiest markets to trade IMO, even in the face of uncertainty. I am up 6% trading very conservatively, position and options trading. Free money (QE) and low volatility amounts to rare conditions not to be seen for a long time in the future so whoever is not making some money at least to pay trading expenses should be brave enough to admit lack of knowledge in this area and quit before it is too late.
It would have been nice not to have this thread to devolve into another "does TA work?" debate, but it seems to have gone into this direction. What I'm going to write may sound harsh to some, but if one cannot be honest here then I see no other reason to come to this site at all. I don't think the OP meant to target TA and chart pattern traders specifically, but I think they were the first to take offense to the idea that consistency in markets was impossible over the long run. Folks, let's face it, identifying technical setups is not hard. I picked up my first book on chart patterns 20 years ago and as a freshman in college knew all the major formations like the back of my hand. Sure, back when there were no computers and everyone needed to draw daily charts by hand, there was something to be said for chart reading, divining patterns in price that revealed underlying demand or supply. But these days, how long does it take any novice to spot a head and shoulders, an ascending triangle, basic lines of support and resistance? How difficult is it with today's software to generate an alert when one moving average crossed another? There's just very little real work involved these days with the usual pre-canned indicators and chart patterns first outlined in Edwards and McGee. And as anything else, you get out what you put in. Technical trading is IMHO, trading on incidentals. It's what many of us dyi individual traders with nothing to rely on but the tape resort to. But often what they are looking at as the impetus to open a position just isn't related to the primary force behind price movement. What succesful trading can be, even for us at home, is far more than that. Why can jpmorgan and goldman have quarters with no losing days? Because they don't need to make stabs in the dark or read tea leaves; they are institutions with a direct line on the pulse of what moves a market. They know the fundamentals, they know the news and the reactions to news, they know the expectations; they know who's likely gotten long where and the levels at where they'd get stopped out. Etcetera. They are light-years ahead of the part-timer who believes a 30-second perusal of a 5, 15, and 60-minute chart should net this month's mortgage. Sorry if this post has morphed into a diatribe on TA, but it's honest and comes from my own experience. I used to trade like many others here, collecting and filing away all my "ideal" model trade results to show any doubting thomases, while the whole time not really noticing or quickly forgetting about the number of identical setups that failed miserably. Getting back to the original topic, I never broke through as a trader until I applied context to just about everything I saw. There are times you will see the exact same setup, the exact same tape, but just know because of context, that this time it will go the other way. Nowadays when I see a countervailing technical formation or indicator in a position I want to be in, I actually feel even more enthused about the potential momentum of the trade. Because in today's thin trading, WE have become the targets, the easy meat -- the mom-and-pop retail money has been out of the markets for a while now. The hedge funds, the HFT robots, they know exactly who they are making money from, and they know all the "classic" setups that we do. So my advice is, know your technicals, but don't rely on them completely. Don't count on consistency in the markets; rather, realize that attaining consistent results as a trader involves constantly adapting to situations, constantly pushing yourself, constantly able to wear different hats at different times. Don't let yourselves become easy static targets, fight the temptation for taking the easy way out every time, think one or more steps ahead. The day you start to notice that a failed signal becomes more profitable than the original setup is the day you take a big step forwards.
For information purposes @ parasitic traders ( front runners ) : profit from : large , slow traders , stale limit orders traders , market makers , upstairs traders . Trading style loses to : Informed traders , Bluffers and manipulators . http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~lharris/ACROBAT/Zerosum.pdf
Surprise, take a look at the date of that paper: May 7, 1993 Many changes in the markets since that time. But I wonder how a parasitic trader can profit from a market maker by front running him. This does not sound right. Market makers have the upper hand over any parasitic trader. By the way, profiting from a trader does not mean driving him to fail. If you are a long-term position style trader and the front-runner steals from you 1 tick, you don't care. I like some of the material in that paper but I think most of it is grossly outdated.
agree but still there is useful information in the table , i think for him market makers is a loose term includes scalpers at that time ...
fireplace is making serious and succinct contributions. Look at any flow sheet that pin points the steps and path to achieving various levels of success. Each of you are at different points along this continuum. Anyone can tabulate his progress up to the point he has reached. The more difficult thing is to project the remaining steps to ultimate expertese. What you are observing is that his point on the continuum is still foreign to you. for example, fireplace could easily post the nest steps you are obligated to go through to reach where he resides. fireplace is not implying anything when he posts. He is posting the steps he observed on his upwardly successful path. you can create the path anyone has completed any time you choose to focus on the steps that they have accomplihed. It is always necessary for a person to go back to the place where you are to be able to communicate to you. You, at present, are stuck. There is nothing wrong with that and it is a good idea for you to post as you do since your posts explain where you are, where you have been and what the current impasse is that you are experiencing. Not many people you respond to are getting any encouragement to help you where you need help to get unstuck. You certainly do not encourage anyone to help you move forward. Trading is counterintuitive and it is not easy to recognize where your intuition hangs you up. Consider, for at least a moment, the potential rewards you could gain if you were able to let go of the collection of beliefs you now have and simply be open to thinking critically about any input you may recieve.