The stronger the trend, the sooner it will end. One day, you traders will get the point that trends only exist in the past. making there use moronic for trading.
it wasnt unexpected at all... il say this.. the signal in 2007 that signaled a top arent present atm. Instead, the counter signal is true, the trend is strong, and its up.
Is it ego? Is it more rewarding (albeit far less profitable) to do things the hard way? Shorting strong stocks is not a high probability outcome, same with picking bottoms in weak stocks. The key to trading better (or one of the many keys to the many doors lol) is to trade things that over the long term will have a high probability of producing a positive outcome. You can make money trading counter trend, but the longer your time frame the more you risk to get run over.... Just look at the chart for POT in august - stock technically in an uptrend since July, the right trade was to look for a swing low for a long entry expecting continuation....all the counter-trend traders that shorted the swing high on august 10 had two days of small profits, then news came out and they got killed....I wonder how many blew up an account that day.... Simple is better.
Also, I see the never ending argument, that there are no reasons for the trend, it's QE or some other reason. So let's short because it will go down.... Trading doesn't care about reasons. The sooner one understands that the better. It doesn't matter why. What matters is the price action, because this is what makes traders money. When things go down you will know they're going down, and the proper signals will trigger - being a hero is great if and when you pick a top/bottom, but pretty useless when you no longer have an account to trade with.
The word 'trend' is often meaningless. Why? What is it? Is it the trend since 1929 or merely the trend over the last 29 minutes. Trend it seems is a 'feel good' word endlessly used by many amateurs. I try and avoid any use of the word. I describe market price movement as 'gyrations' because of the outstanding neutrality of that word. Gyrations are the sequential swings, up and down (or vice versa), of price, from open to close, each trading day. I have specified those swings in past posts when referring, for example, to CL. It will surprise many at ET but highly successful trading in markets lends itself to precision.
What sucks about trading counter trend is even if you short the top of an up move you still have to wait a considerable amount of time while it grinds lower while poking through your entry a bunch of times.
even though i don't trade trends, i could easily pick a few excellent examples when one could have jumped on a particular trend and made a killing. trading is that easy! (at least on ET)
You may call it trend, or disapprove of the term or its meaning, however it can be simplified to higher highs/higher lows, buy breakouts or swings at higher lows for as long as they keep occuring (on all timeframes)....entries play a big part, a lot of traders that wait for new highs to buy get chopped or stopped out on good ideas, because their entries suck and they don't recognize what a good breakout looks like.... Know your breakouts, develop a feel and things become easier....the issue is that to develop a feel you must trade those breakouts that knock your teeth out when they come crashing in, but if you pay attention you'll make money...it takes time but once mastered it's fun.
To counter-trend properly you don't short the top of "an" up move, you short the top of "the" up move. If you don't know how to do that, you've no business counter-trend trading. I lost a LOT of money not knowing how to counter-trend trade. I now know how to do it properly and not only are they my lowest risk trades (smallest imaginable stops of all my trades), they provide some of the quickest profits, often in 1-10 minutes.