Ray - I think you would enjoy reading Schabacker. After Dow, Hamilton, and Rhea, he was a true daddy of TA. His 1932 "Technical Analysis and Stock Market Profits" was the first truly comprehensive tome on TA, and was the source material for Edwards and Magee, as Edwards was his son-in-law. Of more relevance to this "argument" is his 1934 "Stock Market Profits", from which I quoted. A more cynical treatise on the market would be hard to find, Alan's book being its only competitor. You no doubt would appreciate his descriptions of the activities of insiders. I like the old books because they pull no punches, being pre-politically-correct.
I shall forever cherish being considered quaintly pollyannaish. Being the French scholar then, do you think me the Dr. Pangloss of trading? I think you miss the whole point of TA. As so many market observers have noted, the tape knows all. Read the tape, and you know all you need to know. Sure the markets are rife with manipulation, misdirection, deceit, and outright fraud. But those sins create your profit opportunities. Instead of bitching about the likes of an Enron, you short it. Don't bemoan the market manipulations, tag along. I have no illusions about the nature of the market, being at the bottom of the food chain. I watch it all day long, minute by minute. If my bandwidth could handle it, I'd probably watch it tick by tick. There are definitely rules in the market's behavior. What separates you and me from the pro's is that we haven't grasped them all yet. It's like watching ants work. You don't have to know WHY they do what they do in order to understand WHAT they do.
A final note. I like the intellectual side of trading because I get pissed off at so many of the books I have read asserting that you have to be a jock, or a warrior, or a poker player, or a mystic, or born-to-the-business to be a successful trader. Just because intelligence is not REQUIRED to be a good trader, doesn't mean it's a handicap. Of course this hypothesis is yet to be proved!
Thank you for your thoughtful correspondence. Everybody else probably has us on "ignore" by now. Best regards. - Mike |
