Point taken,
Although I have to honestly remind you that you initial approach could be considered not as constructive and mind you Twalker did outstanding work in his post which I accept can not be asked from all of you English tongues. If you will accept the fact that English is not my native language and I cannot put all the responses through the help of my friend Bill G his products I will make an effort.
It’s only fair to introduce myself especially to the non Dutch readers since I started to post on this forum. In the 80’s I just used fundamental data to back-up my investment decisions and all went fine since markets knew just one direction and that was up and only up. At that time I was making a career selling complex IT solutions to primarily financial institutions in Europe making an excellent living with extra money to stack away in stock. At the age of 40 I retired due to circumstances, basically there were no interesting distribution deals left and a Dutch Clown does not settle for less. A friend of mine introduced me to Technical Analysis and I bought a Dutch made piece of software and started trading based on that.
Well what to say, I lost a bundle in a less than a years time and concluded that something had to change since I was in the direction of getting bankrupt soon ( by the way my friend is still a friend). So I got my introduction to Elliott Wave by reading Mr. Bob Prechters book “ Elliott Wave Principle” Key to market behavior and since I have a technical education background it appealed to me. Changed my trading system using more and more wave based decisions and the losing money stopped, let me send a clear message here at this point that a lot of hard work is involved and there is no such this like an easy ride.
In the market there are a lot of so called specialists active who sell their services presenting you with trading signals you can base your market moves on. Basically I feel , having tried a number of these sites, that they generally are more concerned with making money out of you and not as much caring about a solid quality research so I must conclude that they ( fair enough there are exceptions) are a waist of money and the trading advise becomes expensive by huge loses. At that time I started educating people at a Dutch forum, using the alias Clown, on alternatives and explaining that one can very well obtain the needed skills by reading a number of books. The bottom-line is that a pay-service will typically offer you market analysis in the widest form of quality but one will have to realize that trading and therefore the decisions to be made to trade is a hole different ballgame and has to be played accordingly.
As time progressed I came across some documents written by a Mr. W.D. Gann and was fascinated by the fact that this man was introducing a number of issues I knew were TA even before the TA hype started in the second half of last century. And so I introduced a number of this traders idea’s into my own trading and found that , providing applied correctly, they work out astonishingly well in plain English it makes money. And yes I do agree with most of the critics on these techniques, to much alternatives in Elliott Wave counts, a huge number of lines in graphs and it dazzles one if price and time targets come along. But the trading results over the last year are respectable.
At that time I got a renewed introduction by a Dutch analyst on using the ever so known TA indicators like RSI and very much to my own surprise using the indicators differently they were able to become predictive in stead of my previous lagging findings. So an other part of the puzzle was added to the picture and I started to combine the different techniques and the evolution still continues. No Sir there is no such thing as the Holy Grail and I am not looking for it, it’s more like Mr. Gann explains: “I am not so much looking for the exact price and time targets and trend changes, I am in it to make money”.
Reading a lot of critics on Mr. Gann’s work I found an exceptional approach by the link to Astronomy in trading. Mind you I am not talking here about the Astrology (“nomy” versus “logy”) you read about in the tabloids, that’s something totally different. And no Sir I am not looking at the sky to back-up my trading decisions it’s just a simple database check on how the ( in my case Amsterdam AEX) did perform in the past 30 years or so in the identical physical planet situation. Again it’s not the answer it is just an other piece to the puzzle and works out very well.
As this is a project it should have a defined ending but somehow I find myself in moving the goalposts further away from making more winnings than loses into making more win trades than lose trades into making just win trades into finding turning points in value and time more accurately. These updates are for educational purpose only and with the right attitude you will learn how to improve your trading results by making solid decisions, while in the mean time I hope to learn something as well, writing these thoughts down makes me think them through even further for the ones who are wondering what Clown is getting out of all this.
An other area of interest is Cycle Analysis but I have to say that my findings so far are that they workout very well as a sort of overview of the whole picture and need fine tuning desperately because a couple of years off in a 90 years cycle due to different sub cycle division is seen often. An other issue here is the availability of quality data, I have an EOD data file of the DJIA starting in 1897 but most database entries provide 30 years max so studying 90 years cycles becomes somewhat a challenge here.
The provided Clown’s weekly update for the week is in Dutch and focused on the Amsterdam AEX index simply because it has been for months and months and there will be a number of Dutch readers looking for it. Also the index data in extreme detail has been checked and corrected by me personally over the last couple of years, changing to other markets would mean finding high quality data files and that’s not so obvious as it sounds. Anyway there is still a long way to go.
In the mean time I would be happy to join discussions in English as they arise.
Yours Sincerely,
The Dutch Clown.
