China,
Very good point about the profit/effort ratio I thought. and not one that is talked about as much as it should be.
Andy,
That point of Fishers about "time" is not that commonly made but I have come across it before. Someone else included a reference to pop (phantom of the pits) on one of the other threads on T2W. I read it (and it certainly takes some effort to read it all.....) about 5 or 6 years ago and one of POP's core principals is that every trade you put on is wrong until the market proves you right. He even advocates starting to scratch a position unless you are proved right almost immediately.
Btw, imho, there aren't many people that can trade both trend and non-trend days successfully. For most people it's a question of damage limitation on the days that they aren't suited to. As long as you don't follow the throwing a bag of cash at the market method advocated elsewhere, then you can keep some powder dry for the days that do suit you.
As for recognising a trend vs non-trend day.... now there's the 64 million question. There are lots of methods and non of them are even close to perfect. For myself, I look at the first hours trading. A tight first hours range will often lead to a one way trend whilst a wide first hours range will often mean a choppy day. I make no guarantees about this approach
or it's suitability for you
.
However, the reason I use it is because it crops up over and over again in different methods. I've come across derivations of it used by Angell, Crabel, Steidlmayer, blah, blah, the list goes on and on believe me. You may have noticed Fisher even refers to it when he talks about a market that trades in the top 15-20% of the first hours range with the pivot-zone or previous days value at the base of this range.
