Why do folks reveal Profitable Strategies, are they NUTS?
- Thread starter aeliodon
- Start date
You have the emotional maturity and grace of a seven year old (not to mention an out of control ego). I pity anyone who actually read those 400 pages, if your posts in this thread are any indication of their content.
Your true colors are definitely showing here.
Is the huge quote block above YOUR example of trading discussion?
Here's an example of the value of sharing successful strategies: classical chart theory a la Murphy and Edwards/Magee. Why do stocks follow trend channels and also bounce off support and resistance points, etc.? It's psychology. If nobody "knew" about technical analysis, then it would be useless.
Market prices follow trends and support and resistance is seen on charts because people expect them, and they place their buys and sell orders accordingly. The only reason those things "work" is because people believe in them. The "strategies" then become self-fulfilling prophecies.
If i had a new strategy, i'd want as many people as possible using it. Because the more people using it, the better it will work.
But that's only if you're thinking about "strategies" in that broad sense ... the whole SYSTEM.
But ... as a trader, if you want to be able to find some type of indicator that will let you place your trade AHEAD of the pack (besides doing things like placing your limit orders and trailing stops at "odd numbers") that's something else.
If, say someone "discovered" a new indicator for buy or sell that would signal them, say, that a trend was faltering and let them trade accordingly before the herd realized the change was happening, i think that sooner or later that "knowledge" would be incorporated into the program trading systems where you have supercomputers constantly running backtesting of heuristics to see which ones would have made the most money, then it will soon become a matter of whose computers and mathematicians are better.
How many people here at this message board have Ph.D.s from that famous professor in France whose "quant" students are gobbled up by the big money houses to come up with their trading systems? I'd bet zero, because their employment contract would prohibit them from talking about their proprietary systems and they wouldn't be allowed to be doing trading for their own personal account.
It's a cliche but true that anyone arrogant enough to think they can outwit the market will succumb to the overconfidence of greed and they will fail just as LTCM failed. What did they have, two Nobel Prize winners? The best and the brightest ... and all the computer power and data they wanted. If LTCM wanted to see if, say, sunspot activity triggered some market response, they could identify a pattern like that and start using it (secretly) and it might even make them money for a while, but there are very few people who can survive the pitfalls of great financial success based on trading markets. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Soros for the only one i can think of.
Almost all of the successful ones succumb to the over-confidence of Icarus and fall to earth. There is a high correlation between confidence and risk assumption. Say that you found that the yen was moved by sunspots and you started making ForEx bets based on the sunspot data you were getting and nobody else knew your were doing it and making oodles of money. Well, how long would it last?