Quote from marketsurfer:
it is my contention that the once rareified world of TA practioners has become common knowledge thanks to the internet.
TA is appealing because it is easy, look at a picture, let the indicator tell you what to do. what could be more seductive to the start up traders mind?
TA offers a quick fix to understanding the chaotic markets, exactly what the consumer demands....
surfer
Surf,
The internet has changed a great many things, including, indeed, the access to TA and its principles. It has also done the same w/gardening, buying a used car, and forecasting the weather. Yet there are folks, even with all this easily available knowledge, who still have brown thumbs, who buy lemons that break down in a few months, and who go to work w/o an umbrella despite nasty clouds on the horizon. Just because there is information out there doesn't mean people will know how to use it. I think the most successful practioners of TA would tell you that attaining knowledge is only part of the process, that what separates the men from the boys is the same as w/most any endeavor, which is adapting that common knowledge to a unique perspective, a personal style, which works because it is both universal to the market and specific to the trader.
As for indicators, I can only say you're as misinformed as those you ridicule for abusing them. The first TA that I know of came w/Japanese Candlestick charting in the 1600's, which was meant to decipher supply-and-demand, the inevitable and immutable force that drives every auction market. They had no bottom-pane indicators at the time. This interpretation of the supply/demand dynamic was later expanded on by Wyckoff and others in the early part of the last century. They also didn't use any indicators, in fact most of them disdained them. Indicators are relatively new to TA. But if one realizes they are secondary interpretations of supply and demand and if one has incorporated them successfully into a trading plan, who am I to argue? I belong to the church of whatever works for you.
There is no quick fix to interpreting the chaotic market, no, but there is Perspective. Good TA adheres to the laws of supply and demand, the driving force of all markets, which gives one a framework to make an analysis, to achieve a particular point of view, something a trader must have.
H
