An excellent memorable quote. We always hope that formal learning will give us the skills we seek, but it is the doing and the failing that cement the learning. I respect your viewpoint because you have so often been willing to share in postings the hard lessons you have learned, and more importantly, what you understood about the causes of failure. I only wish it were easier to understand the causes of success. Perhaps I was a bit harsh about the benefits of books and training. I should have recommended Mark Douglas.
What I was trying to communicate in my hasty rant is that I believe in approaching the market as if one were a scientist observing a freshly discovered element of nature with a sense of wonder and curiosity. To read in a book that market makers explore with price to find volume is one thing. To actually watch the bid/ask and time/sales in real time in a modest volume issue as this happens is quite another. Hence my advice about watching ants versus reading books about ants.
My poorly made point about watching those "squiggles and numbers" is that the market is fractal. With some exceptions, the same behaviors manifest themselves in yearly, monthly, weekly, daily, hourly, and one-minute charts. Therefore rather than relying on months or years of looking at static charts to sink in, in my opinion it is far more valuable to watch the market at its finest level of detail, learning the essential lessons fast and furious. The tape is, after all, what the greats of lore used to trade with.
For example, I think that the best education is trading 100 shares of an active $40 issue for $2 a round trip, risking maybe $10 a trade. I believe that an observant trader at the end of several days of that would have discovered the hard way the phenomena we call Elliot waves, Fibonacci retracements, Gartleys, butterflies, support, resistance, pivots, triangles, and candlestick patterns. For example, while not yet a good trader, I am far from a novice, and I had no real appreciation for pivot points until I repeatedly found myself taking positions on the wrong side of prices where extended wars were fought, agonizingly watching while price went a nickel this way and that, never enough to shake me out, before zooming away from me.
Perhaps you are right that training and books are required first. In the hindsight of my own experience, however, I believe I spent far to much time "learning" when I should have been LEARNING. |
