TA in no way leads to trading success. The appearance of price action setups is random and distribution of wins and losses among a series of every N trades for any well-researched trading plan is also random. The overall profit expectancy for any well-researched trading plan is not random assuming the vast majority of in-plan setups are traded according to plan. The specifics of how the big traders who move price significantly choose to trade isn't important to me because I've built a trading plan around a framework of price action setups (which are not not picture-perfect candlestick patterns or indicator patterns, by the way) that repeat every day and have been repeating every day for me for at least a few years now. Whatever those big traders are doing, they sure do leave footprints on the charts. In a nutshell, my trading tactics involve "significant support and resistance levels, not in terms of absolute price but in terms of previous significant highs and lows, repeated rejections to break higher or lower". You nailed it. The high rate of failure for traders in general is summed up nicely by Thom Hartle in his Foreword to Mark Douglas' Trading in the Zone: "The 95% failure rate makes sense when you consider how most of us experience life, using skills learned as we grow. When it comes to trading, however, it turns out that the skills we learn to earn high marks in school, advance our careers, and create relationships with other people, the skills we are taught that should carry us through life, turn out to be inappropriate for trading. Traders, we find out, must learn to think in terms of probabilities and to surrender all of the skills we have acquired to achieve virtually every other aspect of our lives."
beginners should exclusively focus on momentum. Momentum, no matter how short-term by definition exhibits auto-correlation and coupled with strict risk management, it forms a basis of much stronger edge than second guessing the market. Beginners have no clue what the market most likely (probabilistically speaking) will do next because they have never had money on the line nor intensively investigated price action. So, why engaging in the futile exercise to guess the market when they can simply jump onto momentum, even auto-correlation breaks down just post 0.1% after trade initiation. Retail traders have the great advantage that they can at all times chose when to be in a trade and when not. They can simply square the position if momentum turns out too short-lived. From my experience that is the way better approach to teach to beginners than asking them to guess which chart pattern applies next. The problem I see is that there are too many snake oil salesmen out there that make a living selling books and holding seminars on technical analysis. They never made a dime, to the contrary, they lost a bunch otherwise they would be trading. On the other hand, there are much fewer snake oil salesmen who teach momentum based strategies because they could not make it, possibly because they traded too leveraged and lost even though their basic approach was right. I ask beginners to chose the techniques that provide more edge over less. The big problem I see with TA is that it forces participants to guess the market whereas momentum based strategies ask the trader to follow price action. There will be moments when momentum vanishes right at the point of trade initiation but statistically that is much less often the case than momentum continuation.
ha, of course do large trades leave a "foot print on chart", I am afraid you attach too much importance to charts. Charts is nothing but a visualization of price action, not more, not less. You are basically saying that a chart of sales revenues tells corporate CEOs what to do next, and that there are patterns (seasonals or what have you) that repeat themselves. Sure there are seasonals but they are not caused by the chart pattern but by the underlying fundamentals and decision making that result in future sales revenues. Think about it for a moment. Charts help to visualize but that is it. The underlying momentum or price reversals/fluctuations are caused by supply and demand and that is most often dictated by large trades and herd behavior NOT by chart patterns. Charts are the RESULT of price action NOT the cause.
Nobody is accusing Surf of theatre. It's what he himself said that this is all this is about (and that is part of why he can't be taken seriously whatever he writes at this site):
LOL! A bigger load of horsecrap has never been written. I'm sorry you PA people will never figure out how to accurately measure trend but that's life. There's more than one way to skin a cat. But there's only one optimal way to skin a cat. And it has nothing to do with PA. It's all about scientific TA. And that bag of wisdom ain't free. P.S. it also has nothing to do with pile drivers or spice drivers or whatever else surf is driving these days.
all of this is funny stuff....you can tell who is making money at trading and who has never made money from trading solely based on their posts btw I actually have a setup called Pile Driver...only requires a few lines of code....tested back to the 90s on hundreds of stocks and is so so profitable
What do you think those large trades leaving a footprint on the chart are telling her about, next weeks weather, or supply and demand, idiot, do you even trade?
It would seem surf and a few others actually want to shut this place down. An endless attack on the most accessible method of entering the market which even if he is forced to agree does work for an individual he concludes they are doing it "the hard way" and should give up anyway. Their message: You cant learn, even from 18 hours a day and years of study. Do not try to learn. Go to a prop shop only or find a professional. Nothing and no one on this board will work. With their total refusal to contribute a viable alternative, I mean the guy describes his trades to the board in TA terms, as to not give up the "secrets" of his method, and his approval of trolls who he states "add great material" such as telling people to fuck off back to their mothers basement and telling people to get a life when asked to simply engage in discussion and tell them how they are wrong, it can only be concluded that surf is saying leave this forum, and if you don't there will be little of worth here by the time we are finished.
Damn... My life is a failure.. 38 pages in a topic about the best traders on ET and no one remember my name...
I hear you brother. doesn't pay well to put effort in and make other people think highly of you. just visit funeral and listen what people really say about deceased, not official mumbo jumbo. it is funny that same mental loop is solely responsible for failure in trading.