Quote from masterm1ne:
Most TA is garbage yes. Making money has really little to do with predicting anything. Moving averages do have their uses. I can and have made really good money trading just a simple trend line break.
I've seen great calls like that after the fact. In my experience it hasn't been consistent enough to be profitable. But if you can make it work, keep doing it.
Your idea reminds me of this guy who had a journal and he was heavily shorting the VIX as a hedge. It worked great, until the vix shot up...
Averaging into a short position is different.
If you're happy living on Ramen and driving a Honda Civic, what's the point in trading....? You could afford that by working at Mc Donalds. I guess you just want to save yourself the time of making big macs.
lol, are you trolling? Just because your income goes up doesn't mean your expenses should go up. I live in a nice place in a safe area. I don't drive much, why should I have an expensive car? Who am I trying to impress? You?
My goal is to increase my net worth, not have expensive stuff. My end goal is to have a high enough net worth that I can live off of passive investments without ever touching the principal.
So I go buy an $80k car. I'm now set back
at least $80k if I pay cash, and more if I make interest payments over time. How is that helping anything if my current car is working just fine? Because I look cooler in an $80k car when I actually drive somewhere 2 or 3 times a month? lol.
People are constant losers because of psychological issues which often leads to poor risk managment. It's not so much that they are wrong by 'chasing the market (method).'
People are constant losers because they don't have a profitable system. Psychology comes into play sometimes, but not nearly as much as people like to say (usually people who can't admit that their system isn't profitable even with flawless execution).
I don't care how you trade or if you make money. Just encouraging thought. It seems like you might be overlooking the the issue that would occur with this strategy in a very strong trend. You'd average down until you couldn't anymore, and unless you have unlimited capital, you could run out of averaging power. I don't have all your figures of course...
I made a lot of money during the last "very strong (down) trend" in 2008. I was hedging my bets that the US economy would not crash. I was right.
Look how many threads there were "OMG, SELL! THE MARKET IS CRUMBLING! YOU ARE DUMB IF YOU AVERAGE INTO THIS!" I bought all the way down (in 2x weighted ETFs) and would've continued to buy more. Look how many people stopped out their positions for losers, whose account sizes fell by 50% or more. I more than doubled my net worth.
Could I have been wrong? Sure. But I was willing to take the risk.
Even back in August of this year during a big down day everyone started freaking out. I made a thread telling people to relax and only one person replied (because everyone else was busy posting in threads about how the economy is collapsing!).
Here's the thread:
http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=225023
I know everyone has his or her own style of trading, though. I say to each his own
