And less then a week later he stopped out ( again ). You need to stop cherry picking short time frames and declaring them successful trades; it's nonsense.
Sometime you just gotta step in front of the bus, just for the thrill of it, or maybe its for the money. I don't eat much. My old saying is, a little bird eats one seed at a time and at the end of the day it has a full belly, I just have to watch out for the hawk
Perspective is important. On one hand, you could say OP only lost 1% 5 or 6 times because he used tight stops and some discipline ( although re-entering his trades almost immediately implies no discipline in recent months ). On the other hand, US indexes went up 30-35% in the same time frame so the opportunity cost of trying to short the same was quite meaningful. He's basically 40% in the hole relative to indexes and targeting a 10% win on each trade, with no wins for a year.
Maybe so, but i can't imagine he would just limit his entries to betting on market tops, he's been here since 2002 and that's 4 years before me. He's far from having limited experience, he's made same pretty impressive trades, so no, he might make some mistakes, but he's making it up else-ware.
No one can really be, its not like there's any transparency here on ET. I do see your point, Markets change and as traders our systems must as well and this is a big issue for most of us. When your used to trading market swings, than markets change from swings to one sided directions. How they cope with this? No one can really know. I'm just giving the person the benefit of the doubt and this is the best approach i can think of.
Here is the situation: There are many those veterans with 20 to 30 years or more at ET, and they are divided into two camps, one called the top was in and predicted the market headed down; the other camp said completely opposite and acclaimed the market was heading even much higher. It is all hypothesis and based on their personal analyses, however, the market outcome will clarify who is right and who is wrong. At any point of market, there is always conflict models/assumptions and no consensus about whether the market is going up or down, and there will be only one winner and one loser; if everyone knows for sure 100 % the price is going UP, nobody would sell, so buyer can't get any share, price would stay the same and no change. Therefore in some sense , market can move because there are always traders who make mistakes in their analyses/predictions and go against the market.