Quote from Fleming Snopes:
Mr. Zones perhaps objects to the fact that you seem to attract to your banner mostly novice traders. There is something slightly squeamish about your expansive encouragement of them when the natural tendency of hard-hearted experienced traders is to be cautionary. So I think he is viscerally drawn to be your detractor. Looking at your work dispassionately, you have added to the classical heritage many useful shorthand phrases. I particularly like the concept of "right side" and "left side", so elegantly spare a description, one that will no doubt survive you. I also like the ambiguity of the Failure to Traverse. No reason given. Or needed. It simply happened. As a confirmed support and resistance trader, often I find myself frustratedly at a loss to explain a major reversal based on S/R on any of my charts. Or based on public news. It is mentally comforting simply to dismiss my profound failure of analysis to say "It was an FTT."
I guess I have always been a squeamer. It comes from the basic idea of helping to solve local problems. Trader power is needed. Who better than a rational person?
I have met some of those traders who are experienced and who behave as you indicate. They do fold into their trading the cautions that come with fear of the early unknowns they had to deal with. Many doing the drawdown thing is a caution as well.
I entered trading right out of grad school and put 50% of my salary into the markets to bolster the 300 dollars I began with. I did not have to pay any tuition it turned out. When I noticed my salary was less than my commissions I rethought the concept of working. Working wasn't in the cards for me.
Working my way through college meant eating twice a day and having a few jobs running but I did get an extra course a term by juggling schedules; tuition was flat rate then.
Heart-hardening is an idea I haven't considered. Basically, a person's job is to help others.
TZ's experience and heritage is what draws him to detract from others. Specifically, he may have looked up my marriages in the NYT and checked the NYSR. I doubt it, though. There is a difference between him and me; we have little overlap in any way. I think he has worked all his life and in an occupation that requires keeping very current. I have just used the same old and tweaked it here and there as technology came into being. Keeping up with technology in the financial industry is easily done.
As you point out the paradigm shift does have its own vocabulary. People do not shift easily from an up down orientation to a market left/right orientation. Being forced to create a paradigm based on science (deduction) was done from day one. Seeing the market's offer has always been the standard; there is no other, actually. Why TZ uses the CW measures is beyond most traders who have successful methods. I think in my case he is phishing 27.4798034 percent of the time (to use a Bwolinski misuse of significant figures expression). How long will it be before anyone follows his instructions to prove something to him?
The evidence is in on who posts at public places to bild a track record. The years and years of posted third party results are in. I do not think thgis could be TZ's standard for whatever he says he needs proven.
His miscues on the literature are classic. Some jokers tested 15,000 rules and felt rules do not work. TZ cites a test of 10 or 12 formations. In the data were two that were smashingly successful. They remained unseen by the authors for some reason. A head and shoulders represents 6 trading actions, the authors did not notice this either. And mostly everthing TZ quotes or refers to leaves out half the market variables. I regard this omission as one that eliminates any validity in research.
Covel writes in his intro which follows a foreword by a guy who makes 20% a year: "This book is the result of an eight year hazardous journey for the truth about trend following." Covel, like TZ's references, does not list volume in his index. Covel like TZ finds my gift to him (the pattern) to be gibberish.
For me, getting viceral has to do with meeting nature on nature's turf and handling the offer (gliding, sailing, blackdiamond skiing, shooting rapids, etc...) or doing trauma center work on weekends 2nd and 3rd shift. None of this makes person hard-hearted either.
TZ's commentary has never gone an inch above chicken shit superficial crap. He knows nothing, roughly speaking, about taking the market's offer. There is nothing to even debate with TZ since his posts have zero informational content.
Trader666 once got to the point of posting something technical. It was a disaster in statisitcal significance and apparently he did not know it. TZ would not have known either if he had replicated T666's folly into backtesting. We get to see this crap passing through on ET unmoderated since math and science is not moderated on ET.
ET could use a couple of moderated places where serious dicussions could be held. The journals we supported had good moderation and the discussions were productive for the participants.
Most academic publications have some sort of qualifying of articles. The financial industry does not. TA certainly doesn't anywhere either. TZ gets sucked in by what he deems to be authoitative. Again, it is a result of his heritage and then experience.
Most traders do not make it past assessing and being beginners who learn repeated failure. By enlarge they do not get or listen to input. Of those who trade our paradigm, there are some common traits. Not many are beginners for long. All of them do put in a lot of work. A lot of reflection is found in the journals. spyder's name for the last one says it all: Iterative Refinement. As a five year effort, it paid off in spades.
All in all, the detractors keep ET members interested in what can happen to a person who doesn't "get it" for any thread's topic or ideas. I regard all members as adults. Each person is at choice and each person gets the consequences of their choices. As indicated some people come here with a construtive attitude; others are detractors.
Today, a detractor depicts me as the pied piper. He ID's himself quite clearly. I can hardly wait for the green curtain and the yellow brick road to show up. Both very good color choices as you see in my long term costuming.
I better feed Toto.
