Shouldn't be a big deal if it is not open and or easy to figure out. Surf may actually have good intentions, I don't know, but in most of his posts trading decisions are referenced as "We" think, etc. Do the "we" people also have good intentions? And when it comes to money, nobody can be totally trusted. I have automated trading systems that work. Took me 10 years to really figure it out. Ain't nobody gettin' 'em. If no one thinks they can possibly make money, so what... Good trading to all. And good luck to Surfy!
TA is just a tool. what isn't sold in books is the fact that profitability really comes from innate characteristics, such as risk taking, courage, patience, pain tolerance and loss management, etc. ie two people can take the same exact trade and have 2 totally different outcomes. i have never read a trading book that teaches someone how to not piss in his pants.
bone, i trade nothing but future spreads using a model i made for years and without giving out any edge from my experience you must be directionally correct even with these as far as the underlying (ie:corn) moves. i admit there are convergence plays out there that even resist underlying moves, but that is rare. there is no way your clients are trading well without being good on direction. where i agree with you is the spread gives a little edge or push over simple es or whatever the wonk is trading as you describe. in my case i still need hours of study daily and decent directional skills. lastly, in your defense i hope never ever to go back to individual futures trading ever again; but it is not the simple thing you make it out to be as i have many buds who tried what i do and failed.
Sure, the spread differential either converges or diverges - but that price action is much easier to model and trade than the underlying flat price. Not sure what you meant regarding the underlying, but any spread that mimics the delta directional traits of the underlying (Gold vs. Silver, or Nikkei vs. Kospi) we do not trade. Maybe another piece is that our models are different - nobody, including myself, needs to spend hours each day pouring over charts. I personally have about 400 spread combinations that I screen with a custom scanner, and tend to 'cherry pick' setups. The trade has to very obvious to me, if I have to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to pick apart a chart, to me that is not good risk/reward. In that sense, having a very large portfolio of spread combinations to monitor for ideal setups is a strength. If I had to restrict my activities to, for example, the CBOT yield curve things would be much tougher.
Then unlevered returns have to be lower. "Easy" and "high returns" don't coexist, unless by "easy" you mean that after putting in years of effort, you now are optimizing an existing strategy rather than developing one from scratch, which is always hard.
Technical analysis is not crap is just not perfect, it's better than random and that alone is an edge worth having.
That is fair, using the term "easy" I meant in comparison to trading a flat price directional market like ES or CL or 6E. I have been spread trading and using CQG, Bloomberg, and eSignal since 1992. What I am doing now is using what has been "optimized" in an evolutionary manner during those 19 years. "Optimized" meaning that I can account for both trending and mean reverting spread price action regimes. As you know, trading requires continual evolution and refinement. Again, I pre-screen experienced traders as potential clients, this isn't really meant to be a 'one-size fits all strategy" and a panacea for newbies. My typical client is already going to be an established trader.
Yeah, I found the original poster's premise to be pretty far out there. First of all, no approach is ever going to be perfect and secondly, as long as an approach isn't perfect, it will never be adopted by every trader in the market, because someone will always think they can "build a better mousetrap". It's human nature to say, "Well, that guy using indicator X is right 55% of the time, I think I can develop indicator Y and be right 56% of the time". So, while I'm not one to go shouting the rules of my approach from the rooftops, I'm not even sure that it would matter if I did, because the only person who'd end up wanting to use it "as-is" would be me anyway. And the market would continue on its merry way.
I've found 1 thing that works for directional trading, so you'll get no argument from me that it's darn near impossible.