Meathead, this all begins to make sense! The major influence that the T/A folks have missed is lunar gravity, or market menstrual cycles.
Seriously, what absolutely kills me about this stuff is the practitioners never offer any statistical proof that it works -- just a series of rationalizations. I find it especially amusing that they wrap their "analysis" up with all of the jargon they can from statististics, and then avoid ever applying statistical analysis to test to see if the predictions work.
This kind of thing is fairly typical: most T/A fans will tell you that T/A is a short-term trading indicator. Yet along come the bears like the McNabbs, wrapping their decision-making in charts, and they've really gotten nowhere other than picking up a few points by selling time-value on naked calls. The big drop was due to Asian currency concerns, and shorting any stock would have worked, but as anyone familiar with modern portfolio theory would tell you, the greater the beta, the greater the expected drop in down markets.
It seems to me that if you're going to short a stock you need to believe that either the entire market is due for a correction or the stock you're shorting is over-valued or you have spotted a major weakness in the internals of the company or the business sector. I have only one success along those lines -- OXHP, although that wasn't bad because it was my only attempt.
Regards,
Paul |
