They're the same person, or at least a few of them are. He's also on target w/r/t Freud, though the unnecessisary verbosity doesn't help much.
In accordance with the alluringly alliterative analogies offered here, let me add a personal example from my own trading. If I understand Freud, we forget because we have no wish to be reminded of something unpleasant which the forgotten thing reminds us of. I have experienced this myself. I have rigid trading rules which continually evolve so that over time new rules completely supplant old ones. But rules remind me that at core I am impetuously and impecuniously impulsive. Of which I do not wish to be reminded. So I often conveniently "forget" a rule which paradoxically allows me to trade an old rule impulsively. Does that make any sense, Dr. Mudgins?
Thunderdog, I fear that ET is not your issue. Low market volatility is. ET is merely the place to which you go to seek credible approaches to squeeze more blood out the turnip. In my professional opinion those approaches only appear credible to the credulous. In my own trading I typically only find ONE setup a day, so I feel your pain. But take heart. Foolishness feeds volatility. And foolishness is on the rise. Tune to ET during those times setups are unlikely to occur, and observe the myriad ways the foolish are following as they ready themselves toplunge into the markets.
Excellent observations. My amazement is perpetually refreshed here that posters "forget" their critical faculties when they pass these portals. For example, if you were three time zones away from home, couldn't sleep, and found yourself surfing infomercials, you would laugh your ass off at the stunning dimpled blonde who cries orgasmically "It's so easy!" while the mellifluous baritone with the dyed hair and the Armani responds "Yes! Just buy when all three lights turn green!" But come to ET, take away the picture and the sound, and what happens? We cannot tolerate the sensory deprivation, so we fill in the blanks. I have very clear and probably totally bogus mental images of how my favorite posters look and sound, right down to facial expressions and verbal inflections. Why don't we make certain posters who WRITE credibly LOOK and SOUND like phonies in our heads? I wish I knew. It would have saved me the expense in time (and sometimes dollars) testing the "systems" they promoted. You know who you are.
Well of course we forget who we are when we come to trading. In many cases that's WHY we come to trading. Because so many of us are nobodies, failures, misfits, neurotics, borderline psychotics. Look at the handles. At the puerile posting. At the losers' longing to follow leaders. Trading gives us no complex feedback like we get in real life. The one simple feedback it does give us we can pass off as bad luck or market manipulation. So we are free to give full reign to our neurotic fantasies. I have an analytical background, so my screen is filled with multicolored wiggly lines driven by elegant codes running in multiple panes spitting out auditory and visual alerts. I am a genius, all my seemingly random education and professional experience magically and mysteriously prepared me to become an ubertrader. One of my favorite posters here apparently has fantasies of omniscience, since he prides himself on the rate at which he can stuff visual information into his brain and comprehend it. Some others have fantasies of munificence. They bestow upon we needy readers pearls of trading wisdom, like "Could it be that there is some significance to the numerical value of the difference between two moving averages?" Oh, the money I have made in my head following such advice!
Yah must be off your rocker! This sounds like a most exclusive and prestigeous thread. "Il vaut mieux vivre sous un roi que sous mille rats." Voltaire [It is better to live under a king than under one thousand rats]
The emerging consensus of the thread participants seems to be that "forgetting" is the primary hindrance to profitable trading. Given the tendency of ET traders, pretend or real, to use complicated charting, it is easy to see why. Something interesting is always going on somewhere, and with so many somewheres on their charts, the potential for distraction is high. How easy must it be to forget that the multiple indications must point to a certainty of market direction or of developing sentiment. For example I know a trader quite intimately who has a most unfortunate fixation on the price of oil, bordering on the delusional. He has an elaborate method for determining if oil and stock indices are behaving "rationally" so that he can enter or exit futures trades (I know this sounds bizarre, but most fetishes are to the disinterested observer). But it is easy to become focused on the wild gyrations of oil, and to trade indices anticipating, rather than confirming, synchrony. With a complex trading screen there are many such potential distracting diversions. The ultimate "forgetting" to which many of us succumb is the "hunch." Often hunches disguise themselves as flashes of genius that one has just discovered the Holy Grail.