Joab's right. Woodie's CCI entries and exits can work. So can ross hooks. So can lots of things. Its the person trying to learn them and the learning process that's at fault not the trading technique.
There are some in this thread who believe Woodie's system works and some who don't. Perhaps the question itself needs to be more specific, namely, Does Woodie's CCI system work AS WOODIE TEACHES IT. Can anyone state that in their experience it is profitable - as he teaches it? If he is adamant about his rules (no stinkin' prices, just take the damn signals, etc) - have you found it works as he presents it?
Ive been in woodies room a few years ago, its been one of my first ''trading clubs'' i have been in, and i met some wonderful people there. The basic method as it was taught was not profitable to me, or to anyone i knew in the room. By doing a lengthy statistical study over time, We managed to get some profit out of woodies CCI patterns by filtering them the best way we could at the time, it was not great profit, it was small profit, but it was nonetheless a great victory for us (me and my trading partner) since it was the first time we were actually decently profitable over a decently long enough period of time. Of course over time since then we discovered new and better setups and we eventually dumped the Woodies CCI entirely.
That's exactly what I was trying to explain. There is no such thing as a perfect system. They all have flaws. But I am ABSOLUTELY sure that with disciplined execution and enough experience WCCI, Ross Hooks, LBR ANTI, LBR "Holy Grail" or whatever we all know about does make money. The other question is something is better suits one trader, something another... But it's no the reason to call one method "BS" and another "good".
As for WCCI... If you want to use CCI, then madscalper's interpretation looks better to me. But if you become a master of ONE exact Woodie pattern then IMO Woodie's rules will work too.
Yes, it is a step in the evolution of the trader ... but ultimately it comes down to price action, pure price action.
I never used Woodies CCI as he taught it and only incorporated it into other tools that I was already using. One of the things that I liked about Woodie was that he intrinsically got the psychological basics of trading right and allot of the mantra's he used in the room were very accurate for a trader. He never charged for anything back then and the room was only a relatively small group of traders and we had alot of fun which made the day enjoyable because of the company. The bottomline is that if you can master price action and one or two filtering tools (CCI, MACD, Bollinger Bands WHATEVER) and you put the TIME and effort into STUDY and then you get your head right, trading is the best business in the world. The road is long and there are no short cuts, so be prepared for the journey.
If you want a real eye opener, try this. Just do random entries with perfect money management on a 1:3 ratio. That means if you have a win of 30 pts your losses need to be 10 pts. This is an always in strategy. Once you get stopped out or make a profit, re-enter immediatly. Use a random entry generator or a coin flip. It will work over time. No charts, no exact entries. No joke. This was actually the best thing I ever learned in woodie's club. Though for some reason they removed everything written about it on the front page. Guess it was when they purged everything about Dana or it made CCI look irrelevent.
Yes, that was in Van Tharp's book among other places. I haven't seen a response yet that the CCI system has worked for someone when used as it is taught. There seem to always be qualifiers - it works combined with something else; it works as well or not as other things; it works when it happens to coincide with the system I really use As an example of filtering information: That it works when combined with other things is useful information. That is does not work as the rules are strictly taught by Woodie (some might use the word "discipline" here) is useful information. That it works as well as something else is not useful information and says nothing because there are no qualifiers (even if the qualifiers are never explicitly identified).