marketsurfer, you're obviously a smart guy, and I suspect you may be guilty of more "closet scribbling" than you care to let on . As you know, lawyer that you are, names or no names is immaterial, I could have just as easily said "individual(s)". What matters is the points being made. And at the very least you and I can agree that the basis for criticizing anyone else's method or approach - whether scribbles, astrology, price drivers, or measuring ripples across the space-time continuum - necessarily requires that one take the time to investigate, understand, and test that method they seek to criticize. But, I reiterate my point made earlier: If someone is happy and successful with his or her own approach and trading results, then he or she will have no need/desire/impulse/reason to wish to waste time that could be spent productively or at leisure stalking, complaining, and otherwise decrying the methods of others. Successful traders do not behave this way. They just don't. Unless, of course, that individual is a promoter of some sort who benefits from the publicity such public pronouncements might generate for his enterprise. I mean, it is possible that one might court controvery almost as a marketing tool, right? But neither you nor I believe that is the case with Buy1Sell2 and these other cranks, right? I mean, otherwise successful people do not go on internet witch hunts. They just don't.
This point can be illustrated more easily by talking a bit about correlations. Star alignments (based on their own laws) can happen to correlate with market movements. It does not imply that star movements are causing market swings or market swings causing star movements. These correlations may happen to be longer lived leading some to believe in their vitality and prompting them to use in making trading decisions. There are others who believe these so called correlations are just accidental. In reality the word correlation and how it's calculated doesn't distinguish between correlations that also have a causal relationship. These causal-correlations (for a lack of a better word) would generally work independently of accidental-correlations though may need further criteria for clarification or usefulness. Astrology may have an accidental-correlation with price behavior but logically does't have a causal-correlation. This leaves it open to the relationship becoming disentangled over time if it ever were entangled in the first place. Gringo
It has now been shown irrefutably that the Scribble method offers nothing of any extraordinary value to a trader or student. It's just a run of the mill ordinary system. There is no emphasis on the most important aspect of any system and that is trade management/risk management. Everything is posted in hindsight. No one makes real time calls. ----The sheer reticence and reluctance of the method proponents to produce any real time trading calls or results and to deflect attention is in and of itself proof of the ordinary nature of this discipline. Not to put too fine of a point on it, but there are just two conclusions that the reader can extract from this curtained approach. 1) The results are not superior to other methods, and 2) The proponents are not really trading. This is troublesome as there are people being taught this system that have the thought that the leaders are really raking it in and soon they will as well. These students may make money with the scribble method but they would probably make money with simple diagonal line crosses as well. This is because there will always be a small percentage of traders who will understand that they need to control risk first and worry about the entry/exit method second. Those people certainly don't need to go through the over-analyzing that the scribble method demands, especially when a method using indicators and price action together can be seen in real time without a lot of preparation,reflection and commiserating. --Or for that matter, simple diagonal line crosses--or MACD crossovers---or RSI grails--or Williams %R bounces--or MA crossovers--or chimpanzees throwing darts at a board. The key to trading is in the trade/risk management. People that know how to manage risk properly have the edge. Studentins need to know this. Now they do.
And yet these charts are hindsight charts. Fancy that. And no plan beyond trading squiggles, none of which provide signals except in hindsight. Which is why the charts are hindsight charts. In real time, things don't always work out so pretty. The SLA/AMT, on the other hand, is rules-based: one knows in advance what he's going to do, in large part because he is familiar with and understands the context: the weekly, daily, and hourly trends. And since he's trading price according to what it's doing in the moment rather than what he thinks it's going to do or might do or what he hopes it does, he will be both short and long as the price action demands. For example, using BS' chart and intervals and beginning at the beginning: Trending, ranging, support, resistance, demand, supply. If one can draw a straight line . . .
exactly. I think this was KP's issue a while back with the way your approach was being demonstrated with hindsight anylysis of how the range you identified was acutally apparently traded Maybe some realtime calls using a large bar interval where the factors that persumably put you off of making calls on a shorter bar interval (time delay/time to focus on your trade etc etc) won't really matter?
What BS seems not to understand is that a beginner -- or a trader who's been struggling for a while -- who is trying to learn something new, or at least different, will, one hopes, go through a period of observation and experimentation and "play" in order to become familiar with what he's trying to learn and determine whether or not it's going to be worth the time and effort. BS appears to take great pleasure in ridiculing these beginners and their efforts, even to the extent of pulling charts out of their journals in order to bypass the journalists' requests that he stop interfering with their journeys. Genuine traders, on the other hand, understand what these beginners are trying to do and respect them for it. That they are exposed to troll behavior by experimenting in public is unfortunate, but as long as nothing is done to resolve this issue, they must either tolerate it or journal in private, which to at least some extent defeats the purpose of a trading forum.
Since one can't illustrate what hasn't happened yet, the outcome of a breakout or reversal or retracement must be shown in hindsight. Only the trigger for the trade can be shown in advance, which is what I've been doing for the past month, eventually with big pointy fingers showing where to buy and sell. If one is afraid to take the breakout, which is what kp's (not uncommon) problem was and I suppose still is, then it's up to the trader to address his own fears. No method can force a trader to take a trade that he's too afraid to take. If he's never able to rid himself of those fears, then he needs to develop an automated system. Or quit.