Quote from marketsurfer:
WRONG. charts are very deceiving. it is one's ability to interpret and think that allows success in the markets. trading what you see worked up to late 90's but unfortunately is a dead end philosophy in the markets of the 21 century.
best,
surfer
WOW! Now that is a smart post! Not to mention the start of the thread! What a great issue to crack onto. Congratulations, marketsurfer - this is one of the very best ET threads I've seen for months! Great work, surf!
My personal opinion - As usual, I can see many naysayers here, but that's just the irony of the market (in order for a minority to make the money, the majority has to be ...) Well, I'd just say I'm absolutely on marketsurfer's side here and agree with the latter statement by him. I couldn't have put it better myself.
To clarify my position : I absolutely advocate proactive, anticipatory trading over reactive, past-based trading. I also believe (confluently with marketsurfer) that reactive trading is a style of the past. It is something that's written about in any trading book. But honestly - Who can still make serious amounts of money in the futures markets, trading like that?
If you trade the present, or worse even, the past, you'll get nowhere in a hurry. You're up against the finest of players out there today, who have already taken all the money off the late 90's amateurs and they use that money to take more - off you! If you want to trade seriously well, you better be on one level with them, and that is preferably anticipating what's going to happen
before it happens!
It is indeed about progressive pre-emption and "path analysis" of various variations in the future, to then pick the path and move of most likely probability in which you have maximum cover and yet freedom to move and at the same time eliminate as many attack opportunities of your opponent as possible. Sounds familiar? Sure does! Exactly like a chess game!
I don't even understand how people can question this? George Soros, a relatively successful trader, knew this a long time ago. He made a fortune with this thought and paradigm in mind, it drove him where he is. He even disclosed this publicly:
"Trading is like playing chess with god." - George Soros
Anybody here play chess? How many of you (who are any good at it) look at what's happened in the past more than what's threatening to happen in the future? Pretty few I'd say.
Why trade differently then? I believe that past-based trading is obsolete, or at least terribly inefficient. People who think this way are the same crowd that uses TA indicators. It's all nonsense. Not only are TA indicators invalid because they only consider price or volume, but rarely both (which is a fatal flaw), but their major flaw is that they are calculated based on the past. To me, 101% useless. What the hell is the past worth? Anybody who thinks you can predict the market future based on the past is just kidding himself. If it were so, then
you wouldn't be taking a cent out of the market, but only some very large super-quant supercomputers programmed to exploit this. There certainly is some validity to the efficient market theory. Sure, you should always be aware of the "strength" of any particular trend and your market situation, but your main mission is to see not where it's gone or where it's going, but where it's going to go. Anticipation of future moves based on current pre-emptive thinking is in no way doubtable, but IMHO a fundamental requirement for a modern trader.
Not to mention the problems that arise with trying to interpret the past or present; Tendency to interpret your opinion or bias into your reading, for example. It's easy to deceive yourself. It is at least an extremely inefficient way of trying to make a living in a market in which everyone has orders in place before you do, because you're the dummy reading the past action. Just because turtletrader.com or Toni Turner tells you this is how you do it doesn't mean that it is how you do it really well.
Myself, I trade almost exclusively this way. I always think-scenarios-forward-anticipate. I give you a brief example:
I see market has certain direction => Market has moved certain amount, let's say 9 Ticks into one direction => I now really expect market to retrace a little, let's say up to 7T (depending on my current stats model). I place a stop order 6T above the current pivot (where the retrace starts), and wait price to hit my stop. All the fools trade what they see and enter at market. I long have my stop in place, generally with the trend and counter the retracement. By the time the retracement hits my 6T stop, I am the first to get filled, because I've been in the game long before everybody else has. I am long filled and in, and at that point, the tape will tick over red or green, and price is likely to continue the other way again (it might trace up to 7T or 8T, setting me back a couple of Ticks, but then will most likey reverse again), and I have locked in profits immediately. I lock in fractal-scaled partials at various profit stages, but this is all automated by my execution platform strategies anyway (ButtonTrader).
Result? Very nice profits, low risk, high probability, low stress and an actual thinking challenge. So I go and make myself a coffee.
The only problem is that the big pro's know the same. Funnily enough, they seem to do the same thing at the same price levels all the time. You can feel the competition. But then there's always plenty enough left to take from the suckers. Thank god even in the 21st century there are still plenty of them around.
I don't trade the past. The past is dead. It's the playground for the losers, I leave it to them. There are a couple of nice quotes who address this issue beautifully:
"The people who live in the past must yield to the people who live in the future. Otherwise the world would begin to turn the other way round." - Arnold Bennett
"The future ain't what it used to be." - Yogi Berra
marketsurfer has once again clearly shown in this thread that he understands these concepts only too well. He has shown a lot more flexibility than LTCM or Enron and replaced sheer conservatism with proactive, anticipatory thinking, envisioning what will happen instead of what has happened. He is going to be one of the people that will lead the financial industry of the future. Who knows - he probably already is. So I am not at all surprised at the general reaction to surf's thoughts. An Einstein quote comes to my mind:
"Great spirits have always found opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence." - Albert Einstein.
Remember : Nobody cares if you're right or wrong. Your ultimate challenge as a trader always remains to beat "them" both in and out the door. And you're not gonna be doing much of that if you waste your time dwelling in the past...
Scientist.