Sometimes giving one's system out may be beneficial. If there're more people to follow (but NOT too many), the signals become more reliable & confirmative. However you need to find an edge in trading before people will follow you. you can't just say something and expect there're enough people to self-fulfil what you say. Another thing to discuss: - don't you think some plain old traditional ideas still work nowadays, with or without some modifications (ie do you think there're already gurus who have told you the "secrets" of trading, but people just don't follow their advice)?
Abolutely. I know that the ACD system, for example, which has been publicized for many years works remarkably well on certain stocks, futures, etc. Many people can't follow it, however, because they are convinced that they are buying too high (breakout) or selling too low (breakdown). I was one of those people and, frankly, I feel it's the counterintuition of breakout trading that makes it so efficacious. And, of course, many solid strategies simply don't work for daytraders or those using too much leverage as they are either determined to pull money out of the market each day or can't tolerate drawdowns that many (all) semi or completely mechanical systems require. A final thought on all of this is that if you think you are onto something and you can't find an indicator or filter to help you test it, then chances are you are onto something. The flip side of that is that almost everything, which can be depicted or strategized using vanilla indicators, is almost surely useless. Bit of a cart/horse argument.
One of the systems which still work is moving averages. I think moving averages, as a simple tool that everyone can understand and use easily, works great to catch mid and long-term trends. It's easy to understand why moving averages, even publicized, still work for more than 100 years. Simply speaking, if there're trends in a market, moving averages will work. However this system is not an easy system to follow because you often get a row of lossess and considerable drawdown before a trend coming up to cover all your past losses. That's not really comfortable comparing to what I can achieve as a manual trader. Some systems just won't fall even if they get publicized. Strange but true.