Quote from Airwaves:
There certainly seems to be some very consistently profiable traders here using TA? 'NoDoji' 'Saliva' 'lexcorp' and a load of others whose names escape me. They post their calls realtime and post blotters.
I wonder what they say when they are told TA doesn't work?...
This is the bulk of the problem about the debates concerning TA.
Too many traders mistakenly believe that just because someone is using TA...it implies it's the only thing they are using. In contrast, profitable traders that do use TA aren't using it all by itself. That's also the wall that backtesters run into...they want to test why someone is profitable and discover the trader is not using "one thing only" in the trading plan. They get more frustrated when they realize the profitable trader is arguably putting more emphasis in their own trading plan via things like discipline, market experience, money management, position size management and many other things.
TA is the easiest to test but why bother if someone isn't willing to test the entire trading plan?
Here's a simple analogy if many reading this still don't understand...pretend there's a book called "Profitable Trading". There's one chapter in the book called "Technical Analysis".
Also, the TraderZones, crgarcia types that say TA doesn't work...they are talking about "technical indicators" (e.g. cci, rsi, stoc, macd et cetera). Thus, they don't consider all that other stuff as TA if it's not technical indicators. You can see this because they themselves talk about their use of charts without technical indicators.
Once again, profitable traders that use TA are not using it alone and it's just one chapter in their book of many chapters.
Last of all, in reference to a comment made by someone else in this thread...I've never had a broker tell me or discuss the use of technical analysis. In contrast, I've heard many sales reps at data vendors (e.g. cqg, esignal, pro realtime, bloomberg et cetera) heavily promote the use of technical indicators to help with trading in an effort to get me to try their software. In fact, just go to any data vendor's website and you'll quickly see the advertising of the so called
bells & whistles that comes with the monthly data software subscription.
However, can you blame the data vendors because it'll be tough to just sell data all by itself without mentioning all the technical indicators it comes with.
Mark