i think it is very honorable to show other traders how you are successful and what you are doing to get to your profitability destination {show them the map you use}. but i do think it is a disservice to drive their car for them to that destination. the other traders need to learn how to drive their own car to get where they feel the need to go --- this gives them confidence and the ability to always drive for themselves. hand holding in the world of trading is never a long term viability for profits --- for you or those you have shown the map. there are many roads leading to any town -- but just one of those roads is usually not big enough to properly hold all the cars going into that town.
just a quick passing response. I track about a dozen trading approaches (methods) (structural arrangements), i. e. , you are "page 34" by initial designation. what I personally note as an extercise is how to double the money velocity of the the gizmo I see. You are a "rebalance" opportunity as I remember; the # 70 is the problem (opportunity). So you can see my point by now, perhaps. The reasons you statement is ass backwards is seen above. what makes a great trader is the trader becoming great by having the experience of realizing the potential the market offers. Sharing the experience of realizing that potential is done in only one way no matter what the approach, etc... A person has to UNDERSTAND how the rubber meets the road. That comes from only one place and source. There are a hundred great road maps. All are easy to come by. But where the rubber meets the road is where the separation of the men and boys occurs. It is a pregnancy test. The answer is simply yes or no. I give away the candy store all the time. In position trading a person starting out makes only a 100% a year for the first year as the evidence indicates. The person is on the way to 500% a year as you will see as time passes. You see also that the single question has an answer of YES for him. A person must do one thing to "get with the program". That is do the drills associated with the method. The reason to do the drills has not been mentioned here. You do drills to get your mind to have parallel strings of pathways that form a high speed highway in your mind. It is a mind thing that makes it possible to be a great trader. (not 24 screens). The question is: Have I done the drills for each part of the approach?? Yes or no. Most of this threat is about cocktail type conversations. Where the rubber meets the road stuff is not generally made available to others is a consequence of the offerer "knowing" it will have consequences that are unapealing. I have found that others using my methods who are millionaires do not affect anything any where. They almost always are coattail traded at any brokerage they use for stock trading. For commodities (in the past when phones were the vogue), the most significant result was discounted fees....LOL (this means the IB knows the business is going to be increasing as traders agrigage to the IB). So you have it ass backwards in my opinion. I am just speaking as a person who gives away all drills that are needed by anyone who is learning to make money. People who ignore doing the drills are not people I am willing to invest in. Almost all people who are not capable of doing drills find that making high velocity money is "unbelievable". It most certainly is for that subset of the population. People who are not oriented to the "process" of learning to make money (which includes doing repeated drills), find nearly everything unbelievable and do their usual routines trying to get stuff from others of their choosing (this level of bullshit they hammer others with is what ID's them). the work of learning to trade is embodied in doing drills that train the mind and "grow" knowledge. this is where the rubber meets the road. Markets are too big to be affected by anyone's personal approach and creations. Big money doesn't make money. Individuals make high velocity money.
"If you had a proven trading system that was consistently profitable, would you share it.." No. But not because other traders are my enemy. They contribute to market liquidity. Simply, I don't want anyone in the market messing with a professional and sophisticated model which is mine. When I want to share I can spend my money on good works and charity .. thats the way to share. If you say would you give anyone some good guidelines and try to shoo them away from the plethora of wrong approaches and ideas. Sure, I would say, Yes. Or sure, I do give that a try from time to time, if nothing else. Once you master a market you will have put an awful lot together. I use a predictive trading model. Most independent traders fail and the few that don't fail are not amassing a huge fortune. You cannot pass on something beyond the grasp of others .. thats the bottom line.
Well stated . . . but what if a majority a traders can't figure out the system. You can't front run what you don't understand.
Other than putting "secret" in quotation marks, I'd agree. Great traders have been giving away, er, "secrets" of the market since early last century. (Wyckoff, for instance.) The mechanics are there in many variations and permutations for everybody and anybody if they look for them. But knowing how the individual pieces move and the basic strategies does not make one a winning chess player. Understanding the stance and how to swing a bat doesn't mean you can hit a ball off a good pitcher. It's the genuine talent of the individual that ultimately determines the difference between success and failure. It is that talent, which is in many ways indefinable, and for which even very hard work may not compensate if one lacks it, that ultimately matters in any competitive endeavor. There are no "secrets" anymore. It comes down to the skill of the individual. How else can one trader say, truthfully, that "there are many ways to make money in this market", while another, after years of work and struggle, can only say "I give up." They're both trading the same market, they both have access to the same info, they're both working hard. What separates them is certainly not information nor access to information, it's talent. H
=============== Agree with your system comments no, you know. But its quite helpfiul to occasionaly share an idea like your title question asks,like lots of good downtrends today; but wouldnt call many energy stocks good downtrends at all today or friday, but pullbacks in strong uptrends.