Is technical analysis the easy option?

Funnily enough....

I set alerts at high of day, low of day, prior high/low, sometimes pivot points, obvious support & resistance points.

Although not because I think they are magical.

These are levels where people with deep pockets tend to spoof and sucker people into positions that they get to regret very quickly.

Very Funny indeed it appears we have more in common than initailly thought, it takes me back to when I was training some trainees up 8/9 years ago, and the market had been doing nothing all day ,4 tick range in the short end fixed income, so I asked the guys what do you think you should do ......so most responded that they have just recognized the daily range and that it was now on the support level for the 5th time so they should buy it, I said I agree with their analysis and then proceeded to sell the support bid, as soon as I did it smashed through the bid and support level and made new lows, when they asked me whay I did that I said because unfortunatley most traders using TA only pluck up the courage to use it when they have had 4or 5 points of confirmation so my logic told me as most of them are usually wrong the level wont hold and even if it does my downside will be tiny compared to the upside if it busts the support. but going back to our intial point of discussion we can still use TA but just unconventionally i.e its good to know what the herd or rather sheep are thinking and when the sheep are looking to enter.

Beachtrader, are you still using your previous method from your journal?
You seemed to do brilliantly. Although im confused, because you mentioned about the 'realisation that TA doesn't work', although id definitely call your method (assuming it hasn't changed) TA...?...

I guess there's always confusion about what TA actually is. I tihnk anything where you look at a stock chart to make your trading decisions is TA.

Has anyone started a thread on the propper way to trade before? (I guess that's Fundamental analysis from what people here say?)

Hi Redart,

I think it would be fair to say that in the past few months my trading has changed almost completely. Dionysus Toast has very succinctly outlined what I do in his post above. I guess you could say I employ a degree of TA (well I draw a horizontal line or 2) but, as WP mentioned above, I am using TA to trade in the opposite direction to most TA traders. I certainly don't have entry set-ups in the traditional TA sense.

With regards to the proper way to trade (I am talking as a complete novice BTW) I'm not sure there really is one. Everything works some of the time but nothing works all of the time. The thing that forced me to shift to what I do now was asking myself why did I keep getting stopped out / faked etc. by using TA set-ups which were meant to work. Once I had got a vague handle on that then a lot of lightbulb moments started happening.

All the best

BT

After extensive searching I personally keep hitting brick walls. I find snippets here and there (important annual economic announcements/seasonal trends), but that's all.
I think it'd be good to have something covering FA to counter the TA mega threads on various boards.

Thanks to everyone that's contributed so far to the discussion, it's been good to read something that didn't descend in to bickering.

It wouldn't be fair for me to say anything bad about TA. I use it all the time for my trading decisions. Most of the time my failed trades are because of poor discipline and bad money management rather than TA. If I stick to good set ups based on TA together with nice risk/reward success rate is much higher than 50%.

Anyway I wouldn't say it's an easy option. It somehow implies that it's easy to apply it - not the case. One need lot of experience as TA is not exact - it's quite an art.

Most analysis at best is flawed, at worst is total tripe. Doesn't matter what you use: TA, FA or order flow. TA is based on knowledge after the fact, FA is based on that overused word 'value' (which is an illusion) and order flow is based on trying to guage momentum or S/R points just by using numbers on a screen which is prone to inherent randomness (due to a lack of liquidity in the extreme short term).

While the above is delibrately cynical, you are actually better off using something than nothing at all. I'm just trying to get across that analysis should be taken with a pinch of salt - the end user should aim to disprove it works and falsify it to get the best result.

At the end of the day, a traders post-trade analysis will be far more important than pre-trade analysis.

Back on topic with TA being easy; I think TA is actually harder than FA! It may look easy but it is open to far more red herrings, superstition and nonsense than analysising a company's balance sheet, for example.

How so?
I was thinking specifically for non-equity instruments when I posted.