A message to some day traders.

[Amahrix]

I believe price data reflects the conscious wills of the market participants translated into action (purchases and sales). That's not to say the price data has a purpose which is intended.

Great, these conscious wills are humans, me and you, or a program built by humans with human biases. We can’t predict human behavior day to day, or weekly, ahead of time, to profit, yet you do? Why are you defending this pseudo nonsense?

My argument is simple. Day trading and using TA in the traditional sense is a hoax. It’s fake. The successes are a result of almost pure 99.9% luck. Yet these amateur retail traders fall for survivorship bias and worship the lucky trader who’s on top as if he is some superhuman.

These people are fooled by Randomness. Is it really so hard to accept this?

 

[SteveH]

Everything about human interaction and life in general has a probabilistic outcome. We're all "lucky" to be alive on any given day.

Worthless thread started by a bitter person.

 

[Amahrix]

Everything about human interaction and life in general has a a probabilistic outcome. We're all "lucky" to be alive on any given day.

Worthless thread.

Far from worthless.

You know there is a trader that is looking up to the current “day trading king” on YouTube who believes that this “day trading king” got there because of his awesome charting tools, deep TA knowledge, and amazing forecasting... but really is getting FOOLED......by randomness. This knowledge is to make them aware of this truth and save them time & money.

What a worthless post. TLDR it next time. This worthless thread got more action going in the span of 2 hours than any thread this month.

 

[Amahrix]

bitter

Bored* and looking for fun person**

but now tired.

Edit: nice edit, thx for adding that in there.

 

[tommcginnis]

Day trading and using TA in the traditional sense is a hoax. It’s fake.

You are 100% captured by attempting (or thinking others are attempting) to know market direction. There is more in price data than that. And it's quite systematic. And it makes people money every day -- *especially* scalpers, and even the high-frequency guys.

Pause a minute, and think about something *besides* market direction, that could make you money watching prices go by.

There is a nearly-ancient "T/A" indicator that is quite useful here. What could that be? How might it clarify?

I'll give you a hint: if you knew ahead-of-time that the market was going to be a horizontal channel for the next two weeks, what would you need within a range of flatness in order to make money from simple buying and selling? No derivatives. No inter-market spreads. Just long and short.

You have no concept of that... But when you can figure it out, you will find a reason for JOY at short-horizon random movement.

 

[Amahrix]

You are 100% captured by attempting (or thinking others are attempting) to know market direction. There is more in price data than that. And it's quite systematic. And it makes people money every day -- *especially* scalpers, and even the high-frequency guys.

Pause a minute, and think about something *besides* market direction, that could make you money watching prices go by.

There is a nearly-ancient "T/A" indicator that is quite useful here. What could that be? How might it clarify?

I'll give you a hint: if you knew ahead-of-time that the market was going to be a horizontal channel for the next two weeks, what would you need within a range of flatness in order to make money from simple buying and selling? No derivatives. No inter-market spreads. Just long and short.

When you can figure that out, you will find a reason for JOY at short-horizon random movement.

I never said it didn’t make people money but.... they’re not making money because of good forecasting via flipping the data and using it to predict short term price movements in the near future. What the hell is the difference between what they do here and people looking at the palm of your hands to tell you how many kids you’ll have in the future. Yaaaaa some will be right and others will be right 25x in a row... because uhhh lucky guess.

 

[Amahrix]

if you knew ahead-of-time that the market was going to be a horizontal channel for the next two weeks,

No one will ever know ahead of time that the market is to be horizontal for the next two weeks. Absolutely no one.

Keyword: “know”, you can take the bet tho, I will... if the price against payoff is right.

 

[lindq]

Market behavior is collective human being behavior. It is unpredictable, just like the behavior of an individual human being is unpredictable.

That's not correct. Human behavior is often very predictable, in every facet of life, and most particularly in finance.

 

[Amahrix]

That's not correct. Human behavior is often very predictable, in every facet of life, and most particularly in finance.

It appears predictable. Markets are heteroskedastic. Unknown unknowns, unpredictable, unknowable tails wipe out people all the time. You can predict your rubbish but you can never ever predict WHAT MATTERS.

 

[tomorton]

Great, these conscious wills are humans, me and you, or a program built by humans with human biases. We can’t predict human behavior day to day, or weekly, ahead of time, to profit, yet you do? Why are you defending this pseudo nonsense?

My argument is simple. Day trading and using TA in the traditional sense is a hoax. It’s fake. The successes are a result of almost pure 99.9% luck. Yet these amateur retail traders fall for survivorship bias and worship the lucky trader who’s on top as if he is some superhuman.

These people are fooled by Randomness. Is it really so hard to accept this?

Not really on the point. I already said, I think, that the humans involved in the decisions that making prices are not randomly chosen, they are selected from a selected and self-selecting group, and their objectives are not random, they are all the same - profit. So the behaviour of humans in a market environment is a long way from being random. In fact, with a large enough group and a long enough time-span, it is very predictable.

I think we agree that the real problems are imposed by day-traders who think they can zero in tot he 5-minute time-frame and that price behaviour really is fractal.