To:Tastes Like Chicken who started this subject
From: Tastes Like Chicken Monday, Jun 11, 2001 9:17 AM
View Replies (1) | Respond to of 977
<font color=green>Dear Jenna,
I'd post this on your own thread, but you banned me for posting my personal trading rules...before you read them yourself. You have obviously taken time to read my posts on investing and day trading. I'm glad about that, I think they will help you.
Jenna, putting "maybe", "might", "possibly" and all the other qualifiers you put into your lame calls does nothing for your credibility. What you still don't understand about all of this is that you're guessing. You are guessing about almost everything. I've never seen a trader that didn't blow up because he couldn't move past guessing.
Any actual, real, professional trader can read your stuff and see exactly what you are doing. You are filtering using a bunch of criteria, making subjective judgements about a few stocks that come up on your screen, and then tossing them out with qualifying statements like "maybe" and "might" so that if you make the wrong call, you are covered. Then you wait until something happens and state publicly that your "pick" went the right way.
You've obviously never taken the Series 7 and worked at a brokerage, because if you had, you would remember the bullpen, where all the rookies sit and do the same thing.
Your make a few subjective judgements about the stuff you've filtered out, and then pick a few stocks to "enhance" with trend lines and comments about various different TA disciplines. The problem with that is you do nothing but "hindsight analysis", you don't know how to draw trend lines, you can't see pennants, flags, or triangles, you have no clue about Point and Figure, you totally misread support and resistance levels, you don't understand the oscillators you try to interpret, you misread volume clues, and your analysis of candlesticks is extremely flawed. Even your analysis of you favorite filter, the moving average, is bizarre about half the time.
A competent technical analyst, such as myself, can see these things easily, but people who don't have a good grasp of TA can miss it. If I buy a software package that scans for signals and then pick 10 or 20 that look "interesting" to me and sell them, the people that are buying are pretty much unaware that the stochastic filter I am using is a default setting, the RSI is a default, and the P&F is a default designed to identify one or two patterns easily recognized by the software. In case you didn't know, even the MA on your filter program is a default, and there are at least three better settings you could use.
In short, I can tell that what you are doing is just a mechanical regurgitation of a few selected default settings on a computer, coupled with some comments about sectors that you have read off your Bloomberg terminal.
The really annoying thing to the rest of us is that you have bastardized the science of Technical Analysis. I mean, you call your discipline "fundo-technical analysis" but you can't draw a friggin' trend line accurately! You don't even know what a "double top" is.
I don't begrudge you your piece of the "guru" pie. There are hundreds of small-time bush league TA people out there that make money off people that for whatever reason don't want to learn the discipline themselves. Lots of them are brokers. You can have all that money you want, and you are welcome to it.
But you should understand something important. When you publicly vilify other TA people, critics, and your own client base, you are simply demonstrating your own professional incompetence. You're showing the world that you're acting like a petulant fifth-grader with a big secret that some adult is quizzing you about.
If you would actually take the time to read and actually understand some of the books you claim are "dog-eared" in your personal library, you would be able to increase your percentage of winning calls up higher than 20%. If you would simply recognize that everyone makes bad calls once in a while, you would be able to stop putting "maybe" after every opinion you send out to your clients. Your self-serving posts and vitriolic personal attacks on this site are simply amusing anecdotes to most of us. I'm surprised Oliver hasn't put a muzzle on you.
Anyway, start with trend lines. Learn how to draw them correctly. You don't just pick two random spots on a chart and connect them. There is a discipline to this. Skip the Point and Figure and candlesticks and stochastic and just learn how to draw a trend line correctly. Once you do that, see if you can accurately draw flags and pennants.
Once you've gotten a feel for trend lines, flags, and pennants, you can branch out into oscillators. The best traditional ones are RSI, stochastic, and MACD. It won't be easy, but once you understand what they are, you can start changing your computer from the default settings on the oscillators and in time, you might see something interesting.
But before you do any of that, you're going to have to learn that misspelled words, twisted analysis of filters you don't understand, and mumbo-jumbo condensed from a copy writer that Bloomberg is paying for opinions only goes so far before you self implode. And that is assuming you are not taking kickbacks under the table on your client's trades at the brokerage that your partners own.
One final suggestion: the next time you flame somebody because you're in a cranky mood for whatever reason, think twice about it. He may be someone that could have been a friend and taught you something you don't know. |
