Why Is The Obvious Not So Obvious?

Discussion in 'Risk Management' started by nysestocks, Jan 25, 2009.

  1. fivaxis

    fivaxis

    This was a very interesting thread, I didn't get it until I read around 350 pages.
     
    #3561     Aug 30, 2013
  2. Obviously you are way smarter than me.

    I already visited this thread unlimited times, almost daily if not hourly, trying to find out what it is about. But I still don't get it!

    Please don't tell me your finding yet. This is the very last thread that keeps me staying on ET.

    Anyway, I vote this the most successful thread, based on the ET standards I understand.

     
    #3562     Aug 30, 2013
  3. bogan22

    bogan22

    :D
     
    #3563     Aug 31, 2013
  4. fivaxis

    fivaxis

    Somewhere in the thread there is a picture of a man pointing at a chart. If I am correct, this picture is significant.
     
    #3564     Sep 1, 2013
  5. Where then, if not in charts??
     
    #3565     Sep 1, 2013
  6. 030985

    030985

    Yes, I think I may understand what you mean. But would you translate this as sometimes people think it is too high to buy or too low to sell etc... instead of trusting what price is saying now and/or their methodologies ?
    Or does it imply something else ?

    Maybe he means with spreadsheets and calculations or statistics that you may not directly perceive by just staring at the chart.
     
    #3566     Sep 11, 2013
  7. RedDuke

    RedDuke

    I will post the answer again: Just do the opposite.
     
    #3567     Sep 11, 2013
  8. 030985

    030985

    If, for instance, someone enters at open, with 1 long and 1 short of the same size ( resulting in a flat position ). Then he knows that his system gives him on average 6 trades a day, so that each time there is a long 'entry' signal he actually closes 1/6 of his Short size and for a long 'exit' signal he will close 1/6 of his Long size ( vice versa for short signals ).
    Can we consider it might be doing the opposite, or are you referring to an 'opposite' of another order/level ?
    I don't think so, but I wanted to ask. :)

    030985
     
    #3568     Sep 11, 2013
  9. New member here. I registered because I just felt the need to chime in.

    You can tell a lot about a person by the persona they attempt to project to the world. The OP acts like a guru. He props up this image by quoting famous thinkers, writers, greek mythology, and obscure texts. He knows "the secret", but he isn't sharing it with you. Nearly everyone else is an idiot to him. He speaks condescendingly to anyone who he thinks has the wrong idea, yet at the same time he claims to know only that he knows nothing. He posts about what a powerful man thinks, says and does because he is attempting to convince you (and even more so himself) that he is one of these men. He claims that you should only think for yourself, but at the same time says that you should listen to him and even makes it obvious that he gets ALL of his ideas from the writings of far greater men.

    Yet he brings absolutely nothing to the table. That is the difference between him and the great thinkers. He props his image up with their wisdom, yet he himself can add nothing to it because he has no thoughts of his own. That is why he cannot reveal his "obvious secret" to you - he has none. He is the living embodiment of hypocrisy.

    I would recommend that any easily impressionable newbies not waste your time on threads like this or any other ones that speak of some grail.

    You want the honest to god truth about the markets? Much of the time the masses act chaotically, and that creates much of the noise. However, that noise has a bias that is created by fundamentals. Trade with the bias. The famous saying is "the trend is your friend". It's true, but check the open trade ratios (on Oanda's web site for example) and you will see that the vast majority of people cannot bring themselves to do this. Everyone thinks that when price moves in a direction, it must reverse. On the FX markets, the GBP/USD is shooting upward and has been for a while. Guess what? About 80% of people are short on it and have been for a while. They are getting eaten alive, and that's because it is common for people to believe that every action must have an immediate equal and opposite reaction.

    Trading is not gambling unless you have no idea what you are doing (and most people don't). The people who claim that trading is gambling tend to be technical traders who simply don't understand the fundamentals and therefore deduce that all market movements are completely random. IF YOU CANNOT SEE THE ORDER IN A SYSTEM, IT IS BECAUSE YOU DON'T HAVE ENOUGH INFORMATION ON WHAT MOVES THAT SYSTEM. Even the seemingly random movements of the market have order - it's just that the thing that moves it (humanity) is too complex for any one of us to completely understand, so it appears random to us. That is why you must find the overall bias and trade with it. A human CAN understand bias and fundamentals. Real market bias does not instantly change, and it doesn't happen on super short time frames. I would say if your trades are completing in less than 4 hours then you are not trading on market bias. You are trading on psychological noise, and that is a dangerous thing to trade on.

    I'm not the type of guy who is going to hide things, so I'll outright say it. Want to know how you find market bias in a chart? My technique is simple - polynomial regression. It is the only trading tool you need IMO. Of course, you may prefer a different technique and that's great if it makes you money. Oh geeze my secret is out now and I won't be able to make money anymore. Oh well.

    That's pretty much it. The OP is a guy who has convinced half the forum that he's a guru, and he may have gone so far as to actually convince himself of it, which was the original goal he set out to accomplish anyway whether he knows it or not. He knows nothing that you don't already know. Ignore him. Hell, ignore me. Just go try everything and figure out what works for you.
     
    #3569     Sep 19, 2013
    Joe6Pack likes this.
  10. BTW, I just thought of a few other things I wanted to add to answer some questions for you guys.

    First, the "obvious" that he's talking about is easy. If price is going up, buy. If price is going down, sell. Like I said in my last post, most people do the opposite by trying to predict reversals. The reason it works is that if price is moving in a direction, it is MOST PROBABLE that it will keep going in that direction. So you bet that it will, and more often than not you will be right. You will be wrong at trend reversals, but those happen much more rarely than the trends themselves. Wow - the OP discovered trend following. Amazing.

    Second, the "snake eyes" thing he was talking about is simply a reversal pattern that has been known to traders for a long time. It doesn't always work, just like any pattern, and it isn't anything special. Think of it like a Gartley butterfly. I've attached a pic from today's EUR/CHF chart. You can see at the top there is an "eye" with the sharp snake like "pupil" spike in the middle. I love blowing this guy's "secrets". It's quite hilarious.

    Third, several of the people involved in this thread are actually the same person. Does anyone else find it creepy that this sociopath took the time to do all this? Making multiple accounts and writing lengthy poems and riddles? Yeah - sure sounds like a successful trader to me.
     
    #3570     Oct 8, 2013
    Joe6Pack likes this.