I often see traders or aspiring traders dismissing technical analysis as invalid or at the very least an unproven path to take. That said, is there some valid way to trade short-term, i.e. intraday other than by using technical analysis? Define TA:<i> "the use of charts and/or chart tools in order to predict pending price action with greater than 50% accuracy"</i> That's my definition of TA. Anyone using price charts with plain bars or any amount of price movement indicators practices TA. Is there another way to successfully trade than that?
yes, there are many other ways to trade. here is the wiki definition of TA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_analysis surf
<i>"From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search Technical analysis, also known as charting, is the study of the trading history (the price and volume over time) of any type of traded security (stocks, commodities, etc.) to attempt to predict future prices."</i> Thank you, <b>Surf</b> Now, what other way(s) are there for off-floor, retail traders (like us) to trade intraday or short-term basis without use of charts = charting? Just curious if someone doesn't use charts for price discovery, that's all.
yes, there are several ways for retail to trade without charts and its done quite commonly. tape reading is one example. best regards, surf
Copied from their site: "EBTA rejects all subjective, interpretive methods of Technical Analysis as worse than wrong, because they are untestable. Thus classical chart patterns, Fibonacci based analysis, Elliott Waves and a host of other ill defined methods are rejected by EBTA. Yet there are numerous practitioners who believe strongly that these methods are not only real but effective. How can this be? Here, EBTA relies on the findings of cognitive psychology to explain how erroneous beliefs arise and thrive despite the lack of valid evidence or even in the face of contrary evidence. Cognitive psychologists have identified various illusions and biases, such as the confirmation bias, illusory correlations, hindsight bias, etc. that explain these erroneous beliefs." Here is at least one major flaw in their study. They are not being truly scientific - at least in their advertising. If they were they would say "We can not test these methods using our current test technologies so we can say nothing about them." Instead they define them as "worse than wrong." And then, unable to test them, they claim them to be "erroneous beliefs." Science is about hypothesis, test, result, not about grandiose pronouncements on things that can't be tested. So good on them for advancing the testing (assuming that they do as promised) but no points for more marketing bull phrases and more untested biases and prejudices. Surf, assuming that the links on these urls of yours are recommender links for Amazon, how much do they pay you?
Hells bells, the holy grail has been in front of me the whole time and I didn't see it.....I HOPE Amazon has a book left for me to buy.....TA sucks and I never knew it.... Thanks to Surfer for the way forward!....
<i>"Thus classical chart patterns, Fibonacci based analysis, Elliott Waves and a host of other ill defined methods are rejected by EBTA. Yet there are numerous practitioners who believe strongly that these methods are not only real but effective. How can this be?"</i> So, the non-trader scientists profess that TA doesn't work because it is not black & white quantifiable? Please explain that concept to my trading accounts. Math is an exact science that does not lie.
Serious explanation: you cut losses short and let profits run (which does not have anything to do with TA).
<i>"Unlike traditional technical analysis, EBTA is restricted to objective methods whose historical profitability can be quantified and then rigorously scrutinized. The author provides a new statistical methodology specifically designed for evaluating the performance of rules that are discovered by data mining, a process in which many rules are back-tested and the best performing rule(s) is selected."</i> Here's a real-time example (attached) of why such a black & white, "quant or bust" view does not apply to our profession, now or ever. The non-trading quants who purport this book's premise could exhaust themselves testing price behavior around daily pivot point values every which way but loose, only to discover no edge exists. In other words, buying or selling pivot point values has zero expectancy for profit. "The market" can only exist by negating all such simple, obvious, quantifiable edges. During certain periods of market behavior, buying or selling the daily pivot is an extremely high-odds setup. Other times, it has no merit at all. There is no way to quantify in black & white exact, specific rules = parameters for when such conditions exist. However, a learned trader can tell at a glance when such conditions are prime. No way to black & white categorize, easily visible in five seconds or less to the discerning eye. Make sense? * If this book's black & white belief system is based on <i>all or nothing, true or false</i> TA works or doesn't work solely on ability to measure, the book is 100% wrong on that aspect for sure. If the reader applies a similar black & white view that said book is either 100% gospel or 100% trash, the ES chart attached votes this title for the rubbish pile. On the pivot point pattern (alone) explained above, I'm up more than +20pts ES for the week on trades taken. Had I traded thru all of yesterday and today, add another +10pts ~ +12pts to that total. There are two more sessions left... chances are high we will see those patterns repeat while conditions remain prime. Could easily be a +50pt ES week for me... using TA applied in precisely a manner said book eschews as impossible.