Are patterns legit?

[bigsnack]

In my experience there are no patterns. If it goes up it's a butterfly and if it goes down it's some other thing. The market is random, but your brain needs to see patterns to build up the confidence to click over and over again. I found the most success picking my own levels before the open and just trading at those levels with my own risk management rules. Probably not what a new guy wants to hear, but the sooner you accept that the sooner you can stop losing.

 

[comagnum]

I remember when TA was heavily promoted to the public and suddenly you had every person with an online account talking about the double top or whatever - most knew very little about how classic TA was intended to work to begin with yet were self proclaimed experts from the 15 minutes they spent learning it and completely neglected risk mgmt which is more important then the entry signal. It was clear classic TA had to go through a major rinse cycle since it got way to crowded - the public is back to doubting classic TA as normal why the bulk of them do nearly the exact same thing: trying to get tiny moves on the 1-5 minute charts in the most crowded trade areas like S/R on the most sideways/non break out index (ES) while being way over leveraged/under capitalized - the HFT's see this crowd as fish food. So do hate on classic TA - that's music to our ears.

 

[bigsnack]

Just out of curiosity, who are you referring to when you say "our"? Are you referring to people that trade classic TA successfully? Is that who you mean?

 

[comagnum]

Just out of curiosity, who are you referring to when you say "our"

Our - meaning those trading classic TA from the wider time frames - primarily from weekly charts & maybe daily down to 1-2 hour charts to fine tune the entry. From the interviews on chat w/traders I have heard a few traders comment on how this arena has little competition. There is no right or wrong way to trade - there are tons of ways to make $ in various time frames. This is the counter opinion on classic TA trading - since it was bashed. .

 

[lawrence-lugar]

If patterns were legit, why hasn't someone developed a program to insert the pattern, then it searches all stocks, and alerts you whenever a stock is about to hit that pattern?

Sorry new to trading. Have money to invest. Please help

Wake up from your naive world, and realize that money can't be printed instantaneously in the market without skill and/or risk involved

And progress from there..., (it's a long road)
Use that as the foundation for your journey and trading ideology and learning,

watch this documentary about Success and conformity

You can make some parallels between the relatively rare successful traders and everyone else out there grinding it day in, day out, doing the same thing bumping their heads against walls.