That doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Smart money is usually defined in the context of specific knowledge about a specific market, e.g. energy commercials vs grain commercials vs bond dealers. The guys on the ADM desk who know where all the railcars of grain are at any given time won't suddenly switch to markets they know nothing about. And cross platform strategies reject the "smart money" label entirely... and even if one applies "smart money" more broadly, the sharpest players don't let themselves be transformed into suckers because when conditions are non-conducive they just don't play. As for hero worshippers, what's the point of breaking them out. There are all kinds of fringe groups that either fall under the unskilled label or have no real impact on markets at all.
Yeah, i wasn't clear-- by market, i meant market conditions not type of market-- in trending markets, trend followers are the smart money, in choppy markets mean reversion guys make money- they both become dumb money when market conditions don't fit their strategy. Take JWH or Dunn for example-- both brilliant guys but they keep on trading despite losing money when their strategies stop working-- i dont think anyone would call either one not sharp. Regarding hero worship-- this was meant in the context of trading-- PTJ says this so it must be true, etc. that kind of hero worship will end up in the poor house. surf
Right, fair enough -- though I would argue "smart money" has more use as a label in the context of specific fundamental knowledge. JWH seems to have been asleep at the wheel for years, not much surprise he shut down... as Michael Platt points out in HFMW, even trend followers have to adapt and evolve at the margins. Re, hero worship etc, that also runs along the lines of Buffett's "three I's" -- innovators, imitators, and idiots. Imitators can make money, sometimes more than the innovators even, but there is a certain threshold where the opportunity is tapped out. Market participants on the whole are more susceptible than average to the Dunning-Kruger effect, because anyone who makes an attempt at trading or investing is self-selecting for confidence in the first place. In such a group, where everyone there is confident by default, much of that confidence will be misplaced. Hero worship, failure to adapt, ideological rigidity, consistently weak analysis, lack of discipline or emotional control... plain old stupidity... all this stuff can be filed under "cannon fodder." I would argue markets are comparable to a casino: In a casino there are lots of games you can't win, and one or two games you can win if you work very, very hard at developing a consistent competitive edge. (Assertions that "the trader has no competition", by the way - ahem, Hershey cough cough - amount to mumbo jumbo bullshit that makes zero sense. You can pretend that you're levitating three inches off the ground as you chant a chakra in the lotus position, but that doesn't make it true.)
The really scary thing is..... as I've progressed thru the development of my own system of market timing, I almost see what you're getting at, although the language barrier is tricky. Binary is not my native.....
You should give a read to TJ Watson JR's autobiography. IBM was all Endicott from the beginning. Once TJ got the drift of what he was being told about speed in doing transactions, he finally permitted some one to call sleepy little Poughkeepsie where the standard time division had sone EE's. It was then that the IBM computer systems were born. Since I am so old I got to live through the invention of the transistor at BTL. I took a monograph from BTL to college where none of the faculty was clued in. LOL... When I did go to work, I felt that military stuff was off limits (except for defensive stuff). Living in the punched card world was an experience. The failsafe aspect of the coding on the cards was a supreme experience. I feel the shift from scalor to vector in information measurement was the real eye opener for trading systems. This thread is a REAL experience for me. Imagine it five years from now when there are quotes that mean something. The scoring of trends, using binary vectors is just beyond the grasp of DH and MS. As Dennis was said to have announced, you could run an add in the NYT's and no one in publishing or WallStreet could "GET IT". The lack of mental processing power that TJ had for electronics is on a par with moving from scalor to vector in making money in markets. How hard would it be for the industry to change its logic processing from up to increasing. For me working in computer logic in the 50's was fun. Vaccuum Tubes did get replaced and the voltage analog became a curent analog. But it was almost impossible for older engineers to make that change. Watch a BTL film on the invention of the transistor. Really drill down on the way a mistake in the lab had to be made for the transistor to be able to work. The credited iventors hadto be shown the mistake and its implications over and over before they got it. Granularity in markets is where the seed for invention was found. Granularity is there staring every observer in the face. No one recognizes it. No one can use it. Anyone can take out a sheet of paper. Can they go through drawing one bar on that sheet and see what granularity gives to them. Then could they on a second sheet begin to work with any of the market variables. In five sheets anyone can outline in detail how the three variables work on their own. here in this thread that was not possible. From a little humor the brainless turn to talking about smart money and their inexperience in being in the presence of smart money. Obviously the smart money's leading 'tells' are found on my Stretch/Squeeze chart. The math behind it includes the market variable from which smart money's performance is all derived. don't wait for a quote from a pundit on how smart money "tells" are measured. How many letters of my name have to be typed into a google search for my name to appear? Is google fucking up? I don't think so. Try getting that to happen with any of the pundits quoted in this thread. You won't find me on facebook. lol....
I'm afraid I have not received the Spirit of the Holy Fractal of The Market, and you're speaking in tongues. I can't follow. But I'm able to channel Bob Prechter at any given moment.....