i was htinking about the live journal thing How is that any justification? Can't ppl just chose not to post their losing trades and only post their winners?
You enter a trade with your broker and then post the trade with all the details onto ET. This can be done within 1 minute or less. Each trade requires two posts, an entry and exit. ET time stamps all posts. (I posted some live Forex trades this way)
If the edge I had was still great, I would still have an office, I would still be taking cuts of the guys I backed and I would have gotten an injunction to prevent my ex partner from revealing the method on trading markets. For a while it was a very profitble edge.
On this site, the same questions and same issues get raised once every two weeks. I am nearly certain someone sits there and posts the same question to keep people active on the site. Look at this idiotic question on this thread: http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?threadid=59170 How many times has this question been asked? And look at the answers, it is truly the blind leading the blind. nitro
After several years I doubt it is possible to come up with a subject that hasnt been covered before. We have been here too long.
But they still don't get it, which is why you have to keep going over it again and again until it gets so boring that you can't go over it one more time . . .
look, the question is not whether TA works or not. I take this as more of a philosophical issue. How big of a doze of TA one uses and when? I bet you a dollar for a doughnut that even Warren Buffet has looked at some charts here and then and even has some of his decisions based on some price patterns for certain commodities or dollar...does that make him a TA based trader? I know people who swear up and down by certain indicators like some crazed professors. If that is making them happy fine. Of course most short term traders by the nature of their trading will be forced to look at TA and make decisions based upon that...since daytrading has not exactly been embroidered by success stories and a reputation of a business that banks lend huge sums of money tells me that short term TA has something of an ill repute. so birds of a feather.....la la la...
i have absolutely no doubt jem is speaking the truth. sure, there are edges in the markets that make some people very very rich. let's see if this makes sense, just because TA can't be tested or proven in a scientific enviroment, DOES NOT mean that it can't be used at certain times, in a certain way, in certain markets for an edge. best, surfer
Might I suggest the value of ET is 95 / 5. That is to say, 95% of the value comes from 5% of the posts. (Those who post the good stuff also get personal value from the clarification of ideas and the mental stimulation of open exchange.) With that said, the "other" 95% is necessary to sustain ET as a community. Similar to Ken Grant's observation that 90% of a good trader's profits will probably come from 10% of his trades -- but he still needs the breakevens to get the home runs. The problem with many threads is simply muddled thinking. Because the cost of creating a new thread or a new post is essentially zero, people routinely offer up the first thing that pops into their heads without thinking it through. (Or they will post a question that has already been answered a thousand times.) But why get upset about that? It's the nature of the beast -- mediocrity dominates by definition, so just appreciate the excellence and shrug off the slop. (As usual I learned this one the hard way. When an outrageous display of ignorance comes around, I still have to fight the urge to respond, and still occasionally give in.) As for the basic flaws in TA, the thread might as well be discussing the basic flaws in capitalism. Criticisms will be too narrow because the topic is too broad. What you wind up with is a 'blind men and the elephant' exercise: one is describing the trunk, another the ear, another the foot and so on.