Thanks for being honest -- this type of attitude while it may not be what people want to hear is refreshing to read. Without going thru your posting history, just on the surface, you sound like someone worth listening to. The amount of bad information on this forum is staggering. I think there are gold nuggets on here but getting thru all the crap and bad information is both exhausting and difficult. I believe to truly approach and understand TA and its intricacies you need to do a lot of your own research thru respected academic sources (not EliteTrader threads where amount of bad info is rampant) before finally coming upon a worthwhile mentor. A good mentor seems absolutely essential to ones success. Everyone here claims to be an expert but there are very few people worth listening to.
That's inevitable - as in most forums, without any quality control of "information"; it can't be anything other than "caveat emptor". I agree. As I was implying just above, the people who have the most to benefit by identifying the occasional gold nuggets are precisely the ones least well equipped to do so. I don't agree quite so unreservedly, on that point, though it can clearly often be beneficial. People vary significantly in the ways in which different kinds of educational inputs help them. For some, it's exactly as you say. For others, depending on a variety of factors, two or three good textbooks might actually be better. Many available "mentors" are far from all they'd like to come across as being, too.
[ PARTIAL QUOTE="Gorgano, post: 3982184, member: 482265"]Hey guys, I'm a relative noob trader, blew up a really small account and dumped myself back on demo for a while now. I've .....US Equities........ Earlier on when I blew up my small acount, I tried to keep things simple by using trade patterns and learning how to read the tape. After reading up a lot of books ....... I was not, and I'm still not, looking for the holy grail, just a few items that would help me confirm my style of trend trading and reversals. So far the indicators that I have are ....., MA ..................................................... I find it very messy and would like to simplify things but I'm not sure what to do. I don't really like the MACD as it seems relatively slow in confirming trends. Any thoughts?[/QUOTE] %,%%%,%%% YES, i dont like MACD either; chart- 50 day moving average, chart-- 200 period moving average can help. 10 year candlechart, barchart can help, all data can help. NOT a prediction. Wisdom is profitable to direct..................................................................................
If there is trend you see it on the chart, if there is consolidation your eye will see it better than any indicator. If you need to use indicators to make a trade you don`t understand current situation and shouldn`t trade. Actually if you know what indicator means (you can read in it`s description) and what you want to trade you don`t need this indicator. Because any indicator is just attempt to describe any visible pattern with mathematical language and it`s visualization. So indicators are useful when you trading or backtesting automatically. Finally using indicators you are trying to make others responsible for your trading results.
That part seems to be correct, but it doesn't follow from that, at all, that "if you know what indicator means, you don't need this indicator". It was the word "because" in your statement above that invalidated it: knowing and understanding something, and knowing how it's worked out, doesn't necessarily preclude the usefulness of a method of displaying it. I'm actually on your side of the discussion (to the extent that I trade without indicators and am skeptical about the ways that many traders try to use them) but your attempted logic above certainly isn't doing the presentation of our perspective any favours in the discussion.
You can use indicators if you understand what they are designed to do and how they are designed. The one first thing one needs to understand about indicators is that they aren't supposed to provide buy/sell signals. Indicators will never uncover some hidden message from the price behavior, the crude price data, because there's no encrypted message to decipher. Just my two cents.
Nonsense. The purpose of an indicator is to indicate. In the context of trading, a technical indicator indicates what the trader should do next: buy, sell or stand pat.