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To: Raymond James Norris who wrote (2381)	7/15/1999 2:01:00 AM
From: Joseph Silent	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10027

Mr. Raymond Norris..... Thanks for your response. The exchange between the other posters and yourself amply demonstrates my point. THERE IS MISSING INFORMATION. Yet, I continue to see "probability 1" predictions based on graphs, earnings and all other kinds of hobgoblins. :) I have nothing against TA, or against your style of analysis. For the record, there are currently three clubs: TA club, FA club, and TAFA club (sounds better than a FATA club, I think :)). Morgan is right in that one shouldn't be confused about which club one belongs to. Regarding missing info. We are looking at a complicated stochastic process and trying to make statements like "it will go up", "it will go up by Monday", "it will go up to 81 if it passes 75" etc etc. That is, making statements about a stochastic process AS IF the process was deterministic. It may have some (moderately) deterministic components, but it is decidedly stochastic. All I am saying is that one cannot predict based on a standard TA graph, UNLESS ALL the factors that go into creating the graph (buyers, sellers, MMS etc) follow the rules of your graph to a tee. I believe that TA's limited success is a RESULT of some element of a "self-fulling" prophecy. In other words, all of Norris's clients will jump on the bandwagon when Norris says "buy". Or, "buy when MACD goes green" or "when stochastic is at 20%". Market-makers have their own TA specialists too. Why shouldn't they? That helps define exactly the kind of graph a TA specialist wants to see. So you, and others like you, are DEFINING (as much as you can) the process which MAKES the graph, and then saying "look, our TA predictions worked!". But, where things go wrong is when the "random" stuff happens and the "people" who "make" the graph disagree on something. The missing information I refer to is data that typically hasn't been easy to get in the past, but will be easier to get (at least to some extent) now, or in the future. A first step is to expand the TA model by using probability statements. As a simple example, you'll be able to say "There's a 75% chance of breaching resistance at 65". At least one can assess risks here. Currently TA leaves you hanging. Hanging on someone's heuristics. The reason that TA has ALL kinds of indicators is because no indicator works all the time. More importantly, no one knows when an indicator works and when one doesn't. That means we are dealing with random phenomena. So all I ask is that we eliminate the TA-supported certainity with which we make statements about probabilistic things. People who don't understand technicalities may easily be impressed and misled. Many people have trouble with normal distributions, standard deviations, Bollinger ands and even exponential averages. Regards, Joseph