From the list river posted, it looks like it is not possible for you to get on the stated path with your predictive models. You said you got the idea from an anonymous poster named “cheese.” Did you apply the same standard to cheese and his followers (if he had any) before going down that path? I’m thinking the answer is no.
Correct. That may very well be.
I don't know of any followers of Cheese. I only ever read his posts and probably a zillion times trying to read between the lines and picking up some pieces here and there in order to inspire my own studies and research eventually resulting in what I call a predictive/statistical model which is simply based on statistics and facts about how the market trades day by day. I have no idea if what I created is similar to what Cheese claimed to have. I say claim because at this point I no longer take anything I read on the internet at face value.
There's a huge difference between Cheese and Jack Hershey, though. Cheese never attempted to mentor anyone, nor did he make any specific claims about performance. He was just a casual poster on ET while Jack was actively teaching/mentoring on ET and making fairly grand claims as far as I can understand it. Interestingly, there does seem to be some similarities between the two approaches, though, in terms of extracting the full offer of the market and trading price movement up/down with a neutral viewpoint.
What I like about the statistical approach is that it's based on numbers and facts. Not assumptions that may or may not be true.
I also think there's some misconceptions about predicting as a prediction is not written in stone. The general idea is that one scenario is more probable than the other (with weighted probabilities), but it's rarely if ever a 100 % probability. And a good predictive model should use updated data to make sure everything is progressing as predicted/anticipated and switch to a different scenario if the initial prediction proved wrong and new data suggets something else is more likely. Maybe a weather forecast could be a good analogy as you'd be stupid to not take out your umbrella if it starts raining even if the forecast said it would be a sunny day.
In my view, every trade decision for a directional trader is a form of prediction. If you go long, you're assuming price will go up. You may say you're just following price, but you wouldn't go long unless you had some kind of signal/trigger or conviction that made you think price would go up from your entry.
Let’s be candid. In any worthwhile activity that requires knowledge, skill and experience, most people do not reach competency. Very few reach expertise. Even fewer are able to reach expertise and illuminate a path to help others reach it as well. Jack Hershey did both. From my viewpoint, that’s all that needs to be said to anyone asking about the man. Currently his writings are still available in the public domain for anyone to discover.
Maybe. I think trading is very different from most activities, though. I would say I'm a competetent engineer without having put that much effort into it. Engineering is a science with thousands of books, resources and colleagues/mentors to learn from, so it's just a matter of problem solving and answering questions as they arises either on your own or through the huge amount of resources most have at their hand as this is usually done within a corporate environment for the average engineer.
In trading, you're in the jungle and you're alone. It took me a while to realize that and it obviously makes it a more difficult path.
As for Jack, I'm not a detractor and actually enjoyed his posts a lot. Maybe I'll find some time to delve even deeper in the future. I really wish he'd taken the time to write a complete book from A to Z. I'm sure it would have been interesting.
But like I alluded to earlier, if the path he illuminated is better than other paths possible, I'm wondering why there's seemingly so few profitable students of him.
