Episodically since I have been reading here, Jack is wont to withdraw periodically from posting for weeks or months. Sometimes it seems to be a snit, sometimes poor health, sometimes perhaps sheer frustration at the impervious ignorance of the latest flock of cooing accolytes. I fear that we approach another such hiatus. This appeared two days ago, two days constituting ominous silence given Jack's prodigious loquacity: "At this point it is best for me to kind of retire from most threads..." So I thought to do a retrospective of sorts, since I have been a vocal critic (yes, yes, I know I am an asshole, no one needs reminding). Like Jack, I tend to repeat myself infuriatingly, so by now most of you, even Jack, know the many meanings of the word "heuristic". I assert that the principal value of SCT is that the study of it is heuristic, in all senses of the word. My critics will say, as Jack has on unccountable occasions, that I am too dense and too characterologically flawed to "get it". Perhaps. Hell, probably. But I will share with you in this thread, if it survives the nonce, what I did "get" from it. You can well imagine that those learnings were all unintended consequences from Jack's viewpoint. I respectfully request of the B-Team that they keep the accustomed feces flinging to a minimum until I can make my points, after which I expect them to send the thread straight to Gehenna.
As I am Hypo's analytical alter ego and chief algorithmicist, I shall commence. Keep your snotty sock puppet comments to yourself, as I am a real person in his head, it's an MPD thing most of you wouldn't understand. Before encountering Jack, or more properly, being literarily mugged by him, I had read scores of trading books and tested a comparable number of trading ideas, trading poorly all the while. My state of frustration, and account depletion, put me in a frame of mind to be receptive to SCT. After all, it IS significantly different from the classical or neoclassical TA you find in books. If I recall correctly, Jack is fond of repeating condescendingly something to the effect that there are 38 different disconnected discontinous edges. He offers a "seamless" alternative to this trading anomie. Having tested one hell of a lot of edges with only fitful success, that approach appealed to me. Now I know different, but I only learned that from going down his rat hole like Alice chasing the white rabbit. Strangely enough, I presently have in my (now modestly successful) trading repertoire some 40 quantitative binary decision setups or edges or events or patterns or whatever you care to call them. Even stranger, those totally explicitly numerical occurrences collectively trigger the chart landscape which Jack sees from a totally different perspective. Hence my starting question: Would you rather be guessing at when and where those events will occur, as in SCT, or would you rather have most of them mapped out ahead of time in price, and sometimes in time? Would you rather have a totally qualitative approach to trading, as in SCT, or would you rather have unambiguous red light/green light trading rules?
No, no, Trader225! We want him to STAY. Hypo would never admit it, but this thread is begging Jack to continue to enlighten the great unwashed on ET. As the skeptical Enlightenment philosopher in Hypo's head and in charge of maintaining rational thought processes, I find it quite astonishing that he and Jack are at odds. They should agree, since they have so much in common. Both are arrogant garrulous old electrical engineers with 134 years between them who enjoyed equally mediocre careers in public service during the 70's and have young wives collectively 34 years younger than they are. They should be playing Bingo together on Wednesday nights. But that is not why I write. At the core of their unlikely disagreement is the issue of simplicity vice complexity. Ever since he was a little shit (he just got bigger), Hypo has had an uncontrollable urge to overcomplicate everything. Theories, relationships, trading, even taking a crap. What finally cured him of this was the abject failure he experienced trying to comprehend in real time all the nefarious and multifarious indicators in SCT. Giving Jack the benefit of the doubt, Hypo had to conclude that he just wasn't as smart as Jack, or at least not as perceptively nimble. So he vowed always to keep his trading screen simple. Now we have never seen a complete SCT trading screen (the brethren are very secretive about it), but we wager that what Joe Doaks has boiled down to (see the attachment) is a lot simpler than full-blown SCT. Apologies for obscuring the study titles, but we musn't give anything away. It would only confuse you. More than SCT does. Oh, and could anything convince you more that I am right about their psyches than that Hypo loves stoplights and Jack loathes them?
The estimable Mr. Hume neglected to conclude that trying to learn SCT was in regards to simplification an heuristic experience for Hypo. He also stepped on my toes a bit wandering into my area of expertise, mental health and self-understanding. Wouldn't you love to have a famous psycho-analyst like me in your head all the time? With Hypo it is a not an option. And it is a full time job for me. To expand on the heuristic benefits for fast-paced multi-stimulus perception of studying SCT, let me explain what I had to get Joe Doaks to code up so Hypo could trade his OWN trading system. Do not be deceived by the aforesaid argument about simplicity. Hypo has 6 tests for irrational exuberance and 24 tests for S/R. Plus 4 tests for what Jack calls "continuation" (see how insidiously SCT has crept into our trading vocabularies? "Right" side. "Left" side. "Change."). Plus, heaven forfend, over 40 setups involving one or more of the 34 tests. So my psych team devised multi-media alerts for the more profitable of those setups, including a vigorous buzzer up the ass for the best one (which occurred twice yesterday, you can see the fuchsia vertical lines for them, what a thrill for Hypo, twice in one day!). So we have flashing lights, pachinko and slot machine sounds, we're expanding the kinesthetic signals in ways I would blush to relate, and even looking into olfactory alerts. So Hypo took to heart Dirty Harry's admonition that "A man ought to know his limits" and fessed up to his perceptual deficits. But he is still envious of Jack. How does he do it at his age? Maintain such rigid attention, we mean.
So what else did we learn unintentionally from Jack? Oh, yes, the importance of volume. Unlike most of our other personalities, I am an artificial construct. Dr. Arthur Deco made me when it was clear we needed a rigidly anal obsessive-compulsive to keep us focussed on NQ when hardly anyone else on ET does. The blandishments to trade ES, ER2 and YM would otherwise be irresistable. To us they are like the sirens inveigling Odysseus. So my ears are full of wax, and my name reminds me what I must trade. Yes. Volume. Well, we never believed in it before Jack. "Try to buy a beer with it!" we'd wisecrack. But we sucked it up and drew our five-minute charts (OMG, like wading through molasses!) and dutifully imagined we could see "guasians". I got REALLY good at seeing them. Put waxed paper over the screen and used my crayons. Then one day Joe mentally bitch-slapped me and said "You dumb fuck! Look at this one minute chart! Now thirty seconds. Now 15. Now 10. Now 5. And one. And here's the tick. You were in the same classes with the rest of us when we studied quantum mechanics. You read Carlos Castenada with us. You know the difference between the macro and the quantum, the tonal and the nagual. I even showed you that 'up' volume and 'down' volume ain't always. Your "guasians" are wholly illusory! As flaky as misappropriating Karl Friedrich Gauss's mathematical namesake for them." But something miraculous happened when I had the tonal slapped out of me. I saw the TRUE meaning of volume (but I still don't get Christmas). And now we have six studies running on the nagual of volume.
Greetings, gentle beings. You who (yoohoo? English is so confusing!) know your eastern philosophies know who I am. Was, actually, since I am the 103rd reincarnation of my illustrious ancestor's only son (that we know of, what with all those luscious houris in the palace one never knows). Any way, it costs money to feed even multiple personalities, so Joe Doaks, the cheap bastard, decided to outsource some coding to India, and here I am. I benefitted from studying SCT because Joe's head hurt trying to code it all up so he could test it ("Can't find anywhere they cite the fucking thresholds," he'd rant, "How the fuck am I supposed to code up something that isn't even QUALITATIVE?"). I guess he figured that a meditative personality like me could pierce the veil of unreality and code the uncodable. And I did try. I learned to capture ticks and test them in real time. For multiple issues simultenuously. I learned sophisticated signal processing techniques, and how to code them efficiently so they don't choke Joe's Apple II. I delved deeply into Jack's posts, filling the obligatory three-ring binders with them (actually, here we use four rings). I wrote literally scores of complex codes, many of which were tours-de-force (considering I had to write them in Apple Basic). After two years of this self flagellation, would you know what I learned from Jack? YOU CAN'T FUCKING CODE WHAT ISN'T THERE! (Excuse my language, gentle beings, but Jack does that to you.)
It falls to me to conclude this pseudo-neo-Platonic-quasi-Humean dialogue. It is our preferred mode of communication with the outside world because it is how we communicate in our own head. What you just read took longer to type than to think, because everybody talked over each other, not unlike the alleged dialogues you see in Spydertrader's futures thread. Many of the preceding remarks about Jack were exceedingly unkind, and in all fairness I must close with a compliment. Perhaps the most influential thing I learned from Jack was to think "What wasn't that?". Although one must give due credit to Alan Farley, who as a fan of Arthur Conan Doyle wrote up the trading equivalent of The Hound of the Baskervilles, asking in his book "The Master Swing Trader" the equivalent question: "What didn't just happen?". Anyway, I ask myself Jack's question all day long. But most critically when apparent FTTs turn out not to be. The answers led me full circle to classical TA and S/R. Which is where the money is. True FTTs only occur at powerful S/R, although they may be exceedingly subtle. Failed FTTs occur where there wasn't anything there. Which is what makes reading Spydertrader's contributors' posts so entertaining. Now all you assholes in the B-Team can ruin the thread, with my enthusiastic permission. Allowing for muliple ali-asses, there can't be more than two of you left. Bury it. Fast. Before anybody learns anything from it. Buenos dias, U-Haul.
Aah, the thread of lost souls. Here you all are. Souls 'R Us. Or should that be rebranded US 'R Souls? I think you meant "quantitative" above in the appeal for hard thresholds to code, btw. Screens have been posted. The solution to pollution is dilution. Have a nice day!
How do you manage to juggle so many personalities in your head? 7 completely different characters on last count. Truly Amazing. Perchance are you occasionally inflicted with episodic hallucinations of being abducted by aliens?