Quote from Zodiac4u:
Spectre, Have you ever noticed when there is a trend change no one posts about their positions. Its actually a pretty good indicator. I am sure you have caught on to this!
it could be just the holidays, that its quiet in terms of the post count for the journal.
the holiday spirit will end as the new year rolls in, recession prognosticators again will be out in full force.
most of the posters here use risk management in terms of stops, and most likely didn't suffer too much, as you can see the games being played leading up to this session.
a clear signal to stay long was a break of the 73, but if you notice the stops were hit on both ends, so most of the one shot players got taken out.
time stops are a solution to this, large specs, may not necessarily use price stops or time stops but a innate sense of model/setup invalidation to exit the trade.
an example is the GBP trade, imagine all the players getting long on the breakdown from 2.10, trendfollowers picking points till doubt sets in as their stops get blown.
The FED gave a initial signal of laxity, with a 50 basis cut, then signaled another 50 basis for the most recent cut, but only ended up cutting 25 basis, just leading to the carnage in dollar bears.
So now we have stable conservative policy, that has resulted in momentary stabilization of the dollar.
I've been trying to read 'Alchemey of Finance' by Soros, it has a excerpt in it from PTJ, I rarely can read more then a page or two at a time but it seems to indicate Soros looked for 'weightings' on a given market secondary to current macro economic expectations.
He would try to look ahead and see which catalysts could undermine those weightings leading to orderflow. (counter trend).