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As I specialize mostly in price action, can confirm that failures of classic price action patterns can be very fruitful, especially when reversal pattern fails during a strong trend. I posted examples of such trades in my journal last week.

Yea, playing failed patterns is quite profitable art by itself.

Not sure if it works in an automated form, but if one tries to code say 5-min inside bars which do not overlap with a few bars before and go for a fixed stop/target I think it could be profitable. But fully automated strategy will always lack one very important moment: context. I doubt it's...

Yes, very true. If you try 2 times and it keeps stopping you out, chances are high you are trying to trade against the creeper and it's better wait or even go with the trend.

I disagree. Range-bound markets are very profitable too, quite often even more profitable than trending periods. The only desired condition is that range would be wide enough to justify risking something at all. Also, there are mini-trends on intra-day time-frames, which occur several times...

Exactly, NoD! :) All we need as traders is have our trades make money over time. Some entries may have 60% hit rate, some may even have 30% hit rate (though, I prefer the higher probability signals :) ), but as long as profits cover losses and put something on top, business is going well.

It depends on what you consider to be failure. For me, confirmed reversals fail to the stage of taking full loss not so often, at least not often enough to make trading them negative expectation game. And as long as it has positive expectation (makes money in other words), I don't care if...

Yes, exactly. Many things are subjective enough to be quite simple technically for a human, but extremely hard if ever possible to automate.

No, not everything technically simple is possible to automate. Playing poker is also very simple technically. Do robots dominate in online poker? No.

Because it's not about automation in the form of computer algo. I was speaking about the art of reading price and volume aka technical analysis, maybe with some fundamental factor added to the picture (especially for longer-term trading). It's about self-automation, similar to military...

Don't remember where exactly I read it, but someone compared trading to weight loss. Everybody knows what to do to lose weight, but only a few from every hundred succeed at it. Same here. Simple technically, very hard emotionally. Emotions are the weak link of us human beings in relation...

Absolutely agree. For me trading is primitive routine of watching price, waiting for it to demonstrate one of the regularly repeating patterns and executing trades according to a pre-defined plan. Period. Nothing else. Just empiric observations and simple rules constructed around those observations.

Oh, you reminded me one important moment! Intellect is by far not the most important quality needed for a successful trader. Most of the best traders I personally know have military professional background, rather than intellectual professional background. I think it is because...

No secrets in this game, just a lot of work, very hard work. :) And, by the way, I don't like 5% number. Way too much for such a scalable profession as trading.

Actually, if my words cause irritation, one who's irritated by them should ask him/herself, why is that? Is that because he/she subconsciously disagrees with the idea that success in trading requires a lot of hard work and nearly insane degree of dedication to this profession? If so, that...

Ad hominem remarks start when there's nothing to say on the subject. :p If most people fail due to wrong expectations or banal laziness and lack of dedication, focus and discipline, psychologist or not, I have to point it out, no matter how harsh it sounds.

Maybe. :) But you don't see the key goal of simple technical analysis. It's not about seeing future. It's about seeing odds. Unless that issue is fixed, even 1000 lives won't help.

Gentlemen, you seem to make complex things look easy and easy things look complex. Successful trading is not about the complexity of trading routine, databases, multiple strategies et cetera, it's about discipline and focus on the simple routine. Same primitive stuff day after day after day...

Yea. What needed is more or less objective criteria for clues of probable trend change. Such as the number of waves in the move, interaction with the channel, which contains the current trend etc.

Discipline and focus. Both practiced as deliberately as to push the limits of human possibilities.