Quote from elit:
How would you know when the market has changed? Just by using your eyes looking at the charts?
The human brain is superior in spotting patterns they say... Yet why do traders fail to see that markets change?
I think its just common sense.
It begins with knowing what type of strategy your using and many don't know what category their strategy falls into.
Therefore, they don't know or
ignore what type of price action is suitable for their strategy.
A simple example is if you know your using a trend following strategy...
Why attempt to apply it in range bound price action?
Traders that know their method is not suitable for a particular type of price action but continues trading in it...
These are traders with an addiction to be in a trade.
These are also the same type of traders that should be using different strategies due to their needs to be trading almost every trading day.
The next step would be to determine (using the same example above) what type of price action the current market is in.
There are many threads on this particular topic here at ET about how to determine if the market is trending, range bound, choppy et cetera.
Also, I intentionally made a word above bold...
ignore.
What I meant via the word
ignore is that many traders know the market has change simply via looking at their own trading results while at the same time not wanting to admit something has changed in the market.
Many will try to tweak (change) the strategy instead of admitting what's really going on.
Maybe profits are declining, profits are rising, profits are flat, less stressful trading, more stressful trading, less frustration, more frustration...
All the above will tell you that markets has change in relationship to your strategy that your using.
Further, your ability to tune into your own stats or day to day personal feelings about the markets will determine if you have the ability to know when markets has changed.
For example, I visit several chat rooms and I already see an unusual number of messages about being frustrated with the price action of November by many different futures traders.
Yet, I have not seen one single message by those same traders that its possible the market has changed.
Guess what, November is a month of change (has been since the 80's) and your trading results this month should reflect such if your trading the Emini, Eurex or Euronext futures or any index related futures.
Thus, depending upon what type of strategy your using, your profits should be above its normal pace or below its normal pace in comparison to prior months.
Simply, our ability to see the change is completely different in our ability to react to the change.
A changed market condition will always be reflected in our profit/loss results.
Something else, we'll see similar like discussions like this next November.
Mark