Have you ever participated in any of these internet chat rooms? Interested to hear any comments/experiences.
I hang in a swing trading chat room every day (swingtrader.net). We use TA exclusively. I only trade intraday microtrends and go flat every close. Some people swing overnite.
I find it extremely valuable (if not just for my sanity) to have others to talk to. It's not your normal stock chat room; the people running it teach people to trade rather than just call entries and exits. There are about 150 people in there every day trading, learning TA and getting a handle on market psychology.
And that brings up a good point about TA: the stock market is not made up of stocks, it is made up of people (whether an institution, a hedgie, a B/D or a day trader -- a human makes the buy/sell decision). And people, having been around quite some time, have a reasonably defined basic set of psychological traits. Those traits manifest themselves quite obviously in candlesticks and candlestick patterns within every time frame.
It is quite truly amazing to me -- now that I have learned to read the patterns -- to see the hope, fear, greed and pain played out in real time on my little candlestick charts.
Make no mistake: I am not done learning. I don't think any trader is.
My education is now focused on multiple timeframe support and resistance analysis (ie. watching the stars line up across the weekly, daily, 30 min, 15 min, 5 min and 2 min. -- "OK, we got three dojis, a shooting star, two haramis and the Naz is gonna lose support here: Get Ready!") You don't run across a ton of them. It really does require a lot of work to find the high-probability low-risk trades. But what in life that is worthwhile is easy?
Dave |
