Kastro, you have been here much longer than most of us. So you have seen the ebb and flow of the ET.
This thread is a real eye opener in just a few pages.
nonsense thunder and cluseau make an assortment of points that can lead you to a viewpoint. Collectively, they point out, by inference, that a comprehensive viewpoint is required.
Illiquid makes another observation about "knowing markets".
Then loads of books are mentioned as well; there is knowledge all about it seems.
icarus binds together the thought of "sufficiency" for the trader to make money.
This weaves for you a possible answer that will serve you well.
For no particularly thoughtful reason, I have been involved with T/A most of my life. I was just exposed to the idea that making money was easy in the markets and grinding away over time, you get far beyond most other methods of having wealth. It turns out to be true according to those who did it and do it.
Start by viewing the market as a system. Secondly, use an orientation to this system as one that has a structure, a process going on within and without it, and that the process produces results.
Use infomation to characterize all of this. The structure of the markets varies and each sort of market performs according to its rules and setting and participants. In any event, the key variables of the market are there to provide the descriptive nature of the processes going on. Historically, fortunately, the owners and operators of markets chose to come up with descriptors of their market's operations. T/A was invented then and there.
So the system is defined by its structure, process, and results produced. To use T/A to make money from this system, you only need to use a sufficient amount of stuff from all that is available as icarus informs us.
By looking everything over completely as illiquid suggests and knowing it down cold, then we can back off and just do what is necessary to make money.
You suggest that you have gotten so far. Nonsense has found out that there are some people who know T/A profoundly and they are "douers" in illiquid's parlance of "knowing the markets".
There is a way to approach this and have a lot of deep and abiding breakthroughs. There are two aspects to deal with: yourself, personnally and the subject of the system:T/A of markets.
T/A has many facets and the inventors of these have given names to some facets and all the other aspects have important characteristics and they are given to you by the market. We want to make this differentiation and keep it is mind.
Making use of all that T/A offers goes through many levels and , here in the thread, it has been made clear that the generic is only so helpful. That is true and it also tells you that the generic is not where effectiveness and efficiency of making money lays.
The direct market characterisitcs is where to focus and the invented T/A stuff is ancillary for you.
The process to complete is suffusing yourself with T/A in a few stages of increasing depth. This is where knowledge is at first acquired and then there is an acquisition of skills. Someone commented that after a point you are on your own in the "learning" process. Well, this is much more than learning.
T/A knowledge is piled up in your brain as a process that then affords you a person structure of information that is valuable. As you learn to learn what is true and what is chaff, you get to be skilled enough to be descriminating. Often descrimination is destroyed repeatedly by failure and what is learned as knowledge is a sophisticated set of stuff about how to fail. This must be sidestepped as often as possible.
Your consciousness is the watchdog for all of this. Externally there is another fine mechanism to use as well. T/A that is good, works all around. It works on all fractal levels of the market. We are limited by the simplicity of the market monitoring so we have to just put up with that. we are also limited by our sensory powers. Neither is a problem, though.
So you are building a mind capable of handling all the market has to give you. The developed mind can handle all of the structure, processes and getting results. It is most easily built on T/A because you find that T/A is very descriptive and forms what is known as "knowing markets".
Because there are so many ways to make money in markets, there is a plethora of theories on that. The purpose of knowing T/A clod is to always be able to extract te potential of the market no matter what is going on. You equip your mind by building to do that. You build a mental T/A system in your mind and skillfully tap it as required.
Here is a possible overview of the T/A scope and bounds.
One relationship drives the variables of the market.
You use a repeated monitoring process to take appropriate pictures of the market.
You analyze the pcitures (you make in real time) much more quickly than the pictures change. The analysis is based upon "knowing the market" in T/A terms.
Do do these two things, is only possible if you get the answers to your original post. That comes from one thing.
It is setting up your monitoring process in order to be able to look at anything necessary anytime you wish. This is where most people screw themselves to the wall unbearably.
As an engineer type person, I do the ordinary. I look at only what is requred at the time but i have everything that is statistically significant available to glance at.
Once you see the fundamental relationship of the market variables operating consistently on any of all the levels available, then you see how to choose the operating point of the market vis a vis making money effectively and efficiently.
T/A is a market thing and not an edge thing, in other words. The market is delivering money continually and the variables tell you about that. There is a pace and velocity at all times and you can always observe it.
T/A deals with the market operation directly and comprehensively. You build in your mind the system to process your observations. The system is build in your mind by purposeful observation of the statisitically significant set of market variables of which there are two and possibly three.
