Why are System Traders Vilified by Discretionary Traders?

"Successful" is a relative term, to different people. I personally don't consider myself successful, yet. Who knows, only time will tell. ops:
That's the beauty of the markets...people come, and people go. Someone can make a killing one day, just as another person can lose a shitload. (not to sound like a crazy gambler or anything...just sayin)

 

No doubt about it!

 

Is that deflection by obfuscation of some sort?

I especially enjoyed the allusion to gravity, a law of physics, somehow not being reliable.

Undeterred, full-frontal, undeniable fact remains, unscathed, that past transaction price data may not be used to foretell the future, any more than the entrails of a pig.

 

Next they will tell you that they do not predict--

But their ( TA true believers) act is predictible

 

No amount of slap application seems to catalyze a positive response in the subjects, doc

 

Any time you place a trade on you are predicting, unless of course you trying to lose? And we are all happy if that is your goal.

 

Is that deflection by obfuscation of some sort?

 

A statement of reality.

 

System traders are predicting statistically and probabilistically, over a large number of trades - not individually, over specific trades.

Like so many of the subjects widely discussed (often with some disagreement and plenty of confusion) in trading forums, the conversations often conceal the fact that different people are using words with slightly different meanings, understandings and assumptions.

In this case, the word causing the disagreements and confusion is "predicting". The confusion in this thread, and in many others like it, is between individual and collective predicting.

I can't tell whether any individual trade I make will be profitable, but I know with a very high degree of mathematical confidence that the next 200 trades I make will collectively be profitable.

On each individual occasion that one trades, one can't predict the future.

But, given the familiarity and expertise with statistics and probability that every successful trader needs and has, one can confidently predict it collectively, in the long run, over the times ones chooses to trade (and of course that's precisely why one chooses those times to trade). And that's what one needs to be able to do.

 

Over the next 200 trades that you take over WHAT time period and WHAT market conditions? Being a career systems trader implies they have multi-decade backtested and live market applicability of their systems to trade profitably, yet this does not exist. You're gambling with a belief in probability on your side.