Reid,
You've covered a lot of ground in your message. I think you miss my point. Let me respond to some of your points.
1. That you expend your time teaching people TA for nothing is very nice, but not relevant to anything I raised. I guess it must make you feel good to do so, or you wouldn't do it. Good for you.
2. I don't think finding out how well you do violates any SEC rules. You could tell us after you did the trades how you did, what your target was, your stops, etc. We'd take your word that you did the trades. No SEC violation there. After all, you're not selling anything.
3. You've just said your brokerage acct. is your scorecard, yet you've said in the past that you have no idea as to how well you do, except that you do very well, thank you. You said you have your CPA figure it all out at the end of the year. This strikes me as strange. Don't you want to know exactly how you're doing and if you're getting better or worse as the months/years go by? What if you try a new twist, e.g. putting more weight on candlesticks--how are you going to know if that new twist works unless you test it out on X number of trades and calculate if it helps or hurts?
The other TA personality (I guess personality is as good a word as any) I follow is Gary B. Smith on SI, who also gives his system away and asks nothing in return. He claims to be very successful, and one can use his system and find out if it works as well as he says or if it doesn't. One thing he does that you don't is keep statistics on everything he does. I think he finds that that helps him to improve and to see what works best. Now that I think of it, he shows charts and says such-and-such stock is a buy, with a stop at $X...and he doesn't seem to be in trouble with the SEC. ;-)
Let me go off on a tangent in this paragraph and say the one thing that you've said that puzzles me the most, and I say it in relationship to Smith, is that you say you keep 70% in long term stocks and 30% using your TA system. Smith is margined to the hilt in his trading acct., and I assume has closer to 90% than 30% of his money in his trading account. If you know that you win 67% of the time, as he does, than it makes sense to have (most of)all your money in the trading basket. If you knew you your win rate was 67% and that you made, e.g. 10% on each win and lost 8% on each loss, why wouldn't you have more than 30% in your trading acct.? So much for my digression...
To say making money using TA on a general down trend is not as likely as an uptrend is to say that you do not understand how to use a 1 minute tick x tick chart or an
L-II server. I use both.
Are you saying that if you're a short term, but not a day trader, that it's as easy to make money in a down trend as in an up market? I don't think the last month has shown that to be true. When you say that something can be bought I don't recall you saying the length of time it can be bought for. It seems to me that in many (probably the majority) of the charts that you mentioned in the last month as buys that buying those has not worked out if you held the stocks for more than a day. If you'd like, I can go back on your thread and post the charts you said could be bought and the subsequent chart action. There have been a lot of losers.
Anyway, my point is that keeping score might result in good things happening..things like spotting patterns in your analysis that work better than others...things like noting when candlesticks work and when they don't....
Seems to me that one could do that and still have a lot of laughs, but VENDIT HAS SPOKEN, so I guess things shall remain the same. ;-)
I'll still tune in occasionally, but I won't post anymore. Don't keep score!! ;-) Good luck. |
