Can't say I blame you. The derision is bad. Seems like the "new" breed of traders see it as something out of the dinosaur age. A relic of times gone by. An old leather shoe. However, it is strange that looking at the a chart from the 1930's and one from 2017 the VERY same patterns appears. So for me it matters not who makes the patterns. Algo...bots..HFT...institutions...the point is they are there. They were made. They can be used to traded to make money. They just ain't "in style". LOL
Its no different than any other endeavor really. Doctors, lawyers, engineers... drink, drugs, bad marriages, families broken. All the same.
I've been trading technically for 18 years and while some times are better than others, little has changed.
Algo's, HFT, laser beams from outer space blah blah...price can go up, down or sideways..period. If and when charts stop working, I'll try something else.
I can't say for sure since I never was a scalper, but I would imagine quite a bit has changed for them.
If they haven't stopped working by now, I'm gonna say they're here to stay. That what Surf misses... so many people trade off of T/A....it can't be ignored. Unless you're holding out for a geo-political or economic black swan, as long as earnings are steady, T/A is going to work for timing. I think Surf was holding out for a macro event that would spook the market. And it still may happen. As long as someone has deep pockets in times like these, they can wait. Its like Ackman and Herbalife.
Folks a lot smarter than Surf, people like Fleckstein, Prechter and Gartman have called for tops many times. And I imagine he just parrots stuff he hears at those investor meetings in Fla.
All his profits market to market all the way down ..well he just gave them back market to market all the way back up...so in that sense yes his losses were real but his gains were real too... From his original short entry ..whatever it was...he hasn't gone underwater in this trade yet ...i don't think ...unless i have his short entry wrong. Semantics.
I have always been a scalper except in my early days when i swingtraded stocks. In terms of scalping today vs 5 years ago i see very little difference scalping when scalping 1 to 10 points. At the tick level yes...hfts messed with that to some degree. And some at the 1 point scalps. And of course when scalping the spread in stocks..all that changed.