Curious. What's your story and angle here? Did you invest a ton of time into this without getting the results you wanted and have now given up and vent on ET? Or are you still trying?
I don't think you or anyone else will ever get anywhere as long as you're followers or book readers or trading room subscribers. Trading is really about mastering yourself and mastering the markets. This means studying and interacting with the markets. Doing research. Asking questions. Answering them. Testing. Failing. Testing. Takes a lot of time. But that's what's required. No shortcuts.
well, let me briefly sum up my previous trading endeavors:
i started my journey somewhere around 2013. i don't remember the reason anymore, i think i wanted to have the freedom to trade whereever i wanted, whenever i wanted, and have a good life.
so what does a guy do, if he wants to learn something, a new skill or acquire new knowledge?
he searches the web. that is what i did. so what does one guy find when he searches the web for trading education? fundamental or technical analysis. well, fundamental analysis is kind of lagging, right? i mean, when the NFP figure is out, it is too late to trade on that. most of the time, it is. unless the consensus forecast is 200k and then the actual number is 500k. that will create some moves in the marketplace, but those events are rare.
professionals try to forecast fundamentals and make trading decisions based on that. they listen to every word Powell says, they track inflation numbers, housing prices and many different things and then predict the next rate hike and position themselves accordingly. when the figure is out, all bets are already made. obviously, for the retail guy, fundamental analysis is too much work. well, no problem, do the educators say, right? there is another way to make money, it is called Technical Analysis. because price ultimately is the result of human interaction, it will produce reoccuring patterns. if you don't believe me, look at those 1000000 stock charts. do you see the head and shoulders, flags, pennants, double/tripple bottoms ...
"wow thats crazy, patterns all over the place. lets make some decent money."
now, good news for you. because you have some mathematical talent/background why don't you check the indicators? check out the MACD/RSI divergence indicator, to check if this indicator supports the next trend leg up or down.
to sum up: that is how i came across the TA stuff. that is why i have those books and courses, i have lots of them. i didn't know better back then. i didn't know the stuff i should have known. but thats the case always, right? that is why it is called experience.
i really spent too much time, backtesting and real trading the ideas, blown up a few accounts, mixed results overall.
sometime, i started to look at TA from a critical point of view. it was not to discredit that approach. i started to dig deeper down. i analyzed how exchanges worked, how the futures markets worked, i analyzed the course creators, their approaches etc. i searched the web for academic research regarding TA.
all in all, thats what i found, just to sum up the key points:
1. research on TA produced mixed results. the majority of papers didn't show any value of TA. the papers, in which TA produces good results, should be viewed critically. academics work with assumptions, you don't see the impact of real-time trade execution or slippage, which will affect your results negatively. there was a documentary about Jim Simons, that he and his teams found a good trading system, which produced really good results in backtesting, but was not profitable in real trading, because of bad execution. they got to fix it ultimately, but the point is, bad execution can destroy a profitable strategy.
2. assuming TA works with decent money/risk management, which means you actively make trading decisions based on new price/chart information, is it possible to outperform buy and hold startegies of S&P ETF? if so, is it really worth it spending so much time looking for a new edge? will your edge evaporate over time? i assume everybody knows John Bollinger, who created the Bollinger Bands. his mini hedge fund outperformed the S&P just by couple of percentage over the last 10 years, or so. and i can tell you, that he doesn't trade only based on TA. if you want you can contact him, you can subsribe to his letters:
https://www.bollingerbands.com/
3. i hope, everybody knows how much a course costs. i think, if somebody has the insolence to ask for that amounts of money, he should at least show his track record. how many trading course sellers show real trades? i know only one guy, who is that much transparent:
https://www.nobsdaytrading.com/
this guy shows in every course 2 weeks of life trading with real money. this guy deserves the money he is asking for. the others all don't!!!!
saying TA works on historical charts is cheap talk, show me the real trades on the hard right edge! like i said in my earlier post: the retard Peter L Brandt (market wizard) deletes the trades that didn't workout, and draws new patterns ......
4. everybody should know the market he trades. in a risk off environment gold price will rise, it does not matter if the price creates a certain pattern or if the indicators show divergence.
predicting where the S&P 500 will go in 5 minutes means, that you predict what the underlying 500 stocks will do as a whole in 5 minutes. do you really think that a certain pattern will help you to predict what 500 stocks will do and what kind of impact it will have on the S&P 500? do you really think that when the arabs cut oil production that the previous resistance level will hold the oil price from rising? did you know that the majority of futures trading is dominated by algorithms?
https://www.cftc.gov/sites/default/...lysis/documents/file/oce_automatedtrading.pdf
i could write a book about that stuff.
