What you're saying is that it works, but you don't like why it works. It doesn't matter why it works. There are so many things that we do because they work, and we don't know why, or just because others do it too.
This is an incredibly illogical argument. Sure good news, bad news, earnings effect the market/stock, that does not say anything about the general validity of TA. TA works with a sequence of events and not just one particular event (let's say Greenspan caughed). By the way Dave, talking about generally TA if it is good or bad is a huge oversimplification. TA is huge. You could argue about small parts of it (Bollinger, RSI, SMA crossover, whatever)if they are valid or not, (some are and some aren't), but with overgeneralization you are not going anywhere and the thread is pointless. Also, just what were you thinking, what did I use for my predictions, my cat's tail? Well, I used TA......
This is not a correct argument. I don't know for a fact that he does, and you don't know for a fact that he doesn't. You have to believe sometimes more than only the things that you can verify yourself or that you can understand. But I'm pretty sure that dr. Alexander Elder is a successful TA trader. And I believe that there are many others successful too. It doesn't mean that if I can't speak Chinese nobody can ..., or does it?
This ET thread My Options Play by Multioption is based on TA. It's a good example of complete TA breakdown. 163 pages of HELL for Multioption as he tries to prove TA works on live trades only to see major losses.
Hey Surfer, Good to see you allowed to post as yourself again. This whole argument is flawed. What you've done is the old "I would like to negotiate with an mba because hes so intelligent that if you keep asking him for reasons why, he will eventually come up with some that you can knock apart" strategy. So you quote silly analogy one ... price = physics ... and as someone with undergraduate degrees in physics and graduate degrees in finance I can assure you that it aint true And then you quote limited analogy one ... price is everything (maybe we both misquoted this one) ... and based on two silly/limited arguments you say "TA doesn't work." Sorry, old boy, but that doesnt make the case. Also, those who say "i tried it, or Xxx tried it, and it didn't work" havent proved anything either. I bet I can find some people who failed in trading at any strategy you could name. LOL, its the nature of this beast. And, then of course, people like me who use forms of price series analysis (I do ignore everything except price and time) and make money doing it say "this proves it works." But of course we're wrong as well because we just might be the lucky subset (with a corresponding subset who fail doing the "same" thing). So the whole argument becomes a joke (like the "do trendlines work threads" - answer = they do for you if you make money with them). Which brings me to my old signature ________________________ The things people believe in are usually just what they instinctively feel is right; the justifications and arguments are the least important part of the belief. That's why you can win the argument, prove them wrong, and still they believe what they did in the first place. You've attacked the wrong thing. So what do you do? Agree to disagree. Or fight. - C. Zakalwe.
Sachs upgrades / downgrades a stock not more often than a few months apart. You can apply TA everyday, and you'll be right some times and wrong other times. Use money management, and you'll weather nicely any adverse Sachs' action. What's your trading approach? What do you trust to make trading decisions?
Hi u_guest, I have to disagree with you on this thread too Multioption started his thread because he was successful in the past, and he just wanted to prove it publicly. Unfortunately so far his stunt didn't work, but nobody claims that TA works all the time. It works statistically as so many other fields of human activity: i.e. medicine and weather forecast, to name only two of them. Also, as somebody mentioned on this thread, TA is a very wide field and with a very large number of followers. You can't dismiss them off hand. I asked somebody else on this thread: what does it work for you? Why do you think that your approach is more sound than TA?
To argue if TA works or not we need to define what TA is. If I find that 150 stocks within 5% from its high and 15 stocks within 5% from its low I will buy (or hold long) because more stocks close to break out than break down. Is it technical trade or Not technical.