BSD
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They sure both shared the charateristic along with Socrates of never posting anything but smoke and mirrors.
That's it in a nutshell !!!
Something some of the TA afficionados here should explain btw is how come Dresdner Bank, now bought out by Commerzbank, have a profitable fund using absolutely nothing but MACD lol for timing entries and exits on the DAX:
http://www.comdirect.de/pbl/static/pdf/corp0075.pdf
Oh and yeah, Mr Paul Tudor Jones himself is proud to be a technician:
“It’s a hell of a lot easier to get an information edge on one stock than it is on the S&P 500. When it comes to trading macro, you cannot rely solely on fundamentals; you have to be a tape reader, which is something of a lost art form. The inability to read a tape and spot trends is also why so many in the relative-value space who rely solely on fundamentals have been annihilated in the past decade. Markets have consistently experienced ‘100-year events’ every five years. While I spend a significant amount of my time on analytics and collecting fundamental information, at the end of the day, I am a slave to the tape and proud of it.
[I come] from that period of crazy volatility [in] the late ’70s and early ’80s, when the amount of fundamental information available on assets was so limited and the volatility so extreme that one had to be a technician … When I got into the business, there was so little information on fundamentals, and what little information one could get was largely imperfect. We learned just to go with the chart."
http://www.marketfolly.com/2008/07/hedge-fund-manager-interviews.html
And Paul Tudor Jones became a multi Billionaire with TA and Elliot wave of all things.
But I'm really outta this thread now, don't feel like wasting any time on this bull**** with zero substance any more.
It's clearly proven that TA works, so just because the majority can't get it to work doesn't really mean zilch, that's just life, it's a pyramind, where many feel callen to reach the top but few are chosen.
One must be in denial if one honestly believes TA can't make you a fortune what with shining benchmarks available freely for inspiration like Richard Dennis who turned 400 bucks into hundreds of millions, or Marty Schwartz with his moving averages, oscillators and bands who averaged out at 33% per month, or fellow market wizard Linda Raaschke with her indicators and TA, or Ed Seykota with his moving averages who made - normalized for withdrawals, several million percent profit from 72 - 88, or Michael Marcus who multiplied his account 2500 fold over 10 years despite being charged 30% profits from his firm every year, or newer examples like Marc Sperling who started out as a prop trader at Broadway and was featured in "Electronic Daytraders Secrets" from ten years ago and is still going strong with a new trading firm and who also uses moving averages as trend filters to buy pullbacks in their direction and makes millions per year, or Dan Zanger who turned 42K into 40 million using old fashioned patterns and TA, or Paul Rotter who is a classic tape reader and has made €50 - 60 million per year scalping the Bund for a decade , and the list could go on and on.
But well, if all that won't allow anyone else to build up sufficient confidence - the most important pre-requisite to making it next to a flexible mind and absolute discipline, nothing will ever work for those naysaying gals and guys.
That's another essential difference between those that make it, and maybe even go on to make it big, and those that don't, those that succeed have an open mind to look around what worked for others and then synthesize and adapt a style out of that that suits their personality while having strong confidence in outcomes.
You see it before it materialises.
Those that don't make it lack confidence and only see insurmountable hurdles, and spend the rest of their career jumping from method to method, abandoning one for the next pipedream at the first string of losers just before a winning phase would have come about again.
It's not the method once you have one that's even roughly aligned with the natural ebb and flow of price in either a trend following or reversion to mean modus, no, it's the ability to stick with it, the discipline to cut losses and not start hoping or averaging down, and holding onto your winners.
As I keep saying it's just a probability game.
You do not need a crystal ball that tells you what happens next to make money.
Problem is most people who want to have a go at this spend their entire career searching for that exact crystal ball, refusing to accept that neither that nor certainty do not exist in trading, nor are they necessary.
But then again most aren't in this to make money anyway, they are in this to prove how clever they are to themselves in their ability to predict what happens next which comes at the detriment of net profitability, and just plain old thrills:
An Analysis of the Profiles and Motivations of Habitual Commodity Speculators
The focus of this study is the habitual speculator in commodity futures markets.
Responses to a 73 question survey were collected directly from retail commodity brokers with offices in Alabama. Each questionnaire recorded information on an individual commodity client who had traded for an extended period of time.
The typical trader studied is a married, white male, age 52. He is affluent and well educated. He is a self-employed business owner who can recover from financial setbacks. He is a politically right wing conservative involved in the political process. He assumes a good deal of risk in most phases of his life. He is both an aggressive investor and an active gambler. This trader does not consider preservation of his commodity capital to be a very high trading priority. As a result, he rarely uses stop loss orders. He wins more frequently than he loses (over 51% of the time) but is an overall net loser in dollar terms. In spite of recurring trading losses, he has never made any substantial change in his basic trading style. To this trader, whether he won or lost on a particular trade is more important than the size of the win or loss. Thus he consistently cuts his profits short while letting his losses run. He also worries more about missing a move in the market by being on the sidelines than about losing by being on the wrong side of a market move; i.e., being in the action is more important than the financial consequences.
An Analysis of the Profiles and Motivations of Habitual Commodity Speculators
