One major problem with the internet is coveying the tone you mean without spending too much time typing. I post between simulations and such from work as a mental break and don't have tons of time to get it right. I assume most others are in the same boat. I rely on my credibility and past posts to get the forgiveness for sounding a bit brash and I feel all have granted it to me. With that said....now at home with a cup of java...
#1 Truman. Click on his name and read his last few posts. Then remember that he has been sparing with Dipy and Rill for months if not a whole year yet he only complained about buying too soon at 8650 and he was gone.... My take was all the work he put into the thread did nothing for his investment return above what following a DCA or follow the newsletter approach would yield.
#2 My concern with the model is more an issue of credibility. Bob issued VERY STRONG statements about what his model (and he) was predicting, especially the bottom of the correction. Even now, he makes a big deal about some magic closing number of "less than 20%" which is really silly in my view as the only real number that matters is what the market does in real time, i.e. intraday lows and highs. Open and close levels are just snapshots of realtime events and yet he goes on like the closing numbers are so important. Maybe I don't see the important reason the he does with his much larger experience level. Sure there is some closing out of positions by traders, but it just seems a bit strange to say a model isn't that accurate then post and broadcast how important a few tenths of a percent are for his accuracy. I guess I am saying he can't have it both ways and I prefer the less accurate method which is more arm waving and less TA.
#3 He did say that if he got an intermediate sell signal he would be predisposed top go to cash as most bear markets are preceded by an
intermediate correction.
Exactly, just in different words. OK, say his model HAD correctly predicted this intermediate term correction, then would he have had us going to cash rather than buying as the market went from 10% down to 19.8% down? Why or why not? What has he learned?
#4 I don't think you can adjust what is essentially a rational model the vagaries of the marketplace...
Actually it is rather simple, you increase your error bars. Every time you get new data that you can't fit to your model, you either widen your error bars to cover the data or throw out the model. You may end up throwing out your model anyway if and when the error bars get too wide to be of any use. To me, it seems that the error bars added 9.8% to the predicted timing model numbers since Bob was so gung-ho on it only being a 10% correction within 3% error. As a "timing model", I think we may be close to this (throwing it out) though it still seems to be an excellent "market direction model".
Remember, I am an engineer and I have been spending the last year modeling the behavior of photon detectors under bias and extreme power levels so I have experience in what I am talking about....just in a different field. It would be an interesting career change to try working on Bob's model..... as the number of variables are many,many times higher so it seems that it has to be much more statistical and thus I would not rely on how exact it is, but rather how well it predicts direction and trends. Knowing that the market goes up sure make it easy to buy on 10% dips and even easier on 20% dips (I've made about 10% already on the bargains I scooped up in stocks on the day we hit the low...)
Hope this helps.....
Kirk out
PS As I said in a post on the other thread -> Ralph looks pretty silly getting his followers out at 8600 and back in at 8050 as they had huge capital gains to pay from riding him up from 4000 or lower. In my viewpoint, Bob comes out far in front for keeping his listeners fully invested and not paying needless taxes.
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