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Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Steve Lee who wrote (27766)	2/14/2000 9:54:00 PM
From: QwikSand	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 64865

Do you have an explanation for your TA non-believer status? Exsqueeze me? The burden of proof is on you. You claim that it works well...so do thousands of race track touts who traded their checkered sport coats for Armani suits and now sell technical analysis newsletter with fancy stock titles instead of "Horse & Jockey Daily Picks". The evidence for it is all anecdotal. You read the supposedly standard works on the subject, and the introductory part about why it must be true (before they get into the cups and handles) is that "It's just psychology" or "it's obvious" or some other homespun homily. I haven't seen one yet that starts out with mathematical or even empirical rigor. In "Beat the Dealer", Edward O. Thorpe's seminal work on blackjack, he starts out by saying, "I ran a computer simulation of this system on 100 million hands of blackjack and I'm certain that it gives the player an 0.5% advantage." Where's the equivalent for TA? All the people it's made rich? Then maybe the lottery works too. At the risk of repeating myself (I think I've posted this before),my theory is that playing stocks (and here I mean what Buffett would call speculation, not what he would call investing) is like playing poker. Some people have a talent for it. Some people don't. Some people have mental facilities or personality configurations that we don't know enough brain science to understand yet, that gives them more of a talent for "reading" charts and general market tone than somebody else. Others are just lucky. But until somebody goes back over the infinite amount of available data and analyzes it rigorously to prove TA actually has predictive value in more than 50% of situations, there is simply no reason to believe it. --QS

To: Steve Lee who wrote (27766)	2/15/2000 1:07:00 AM
From: JC Jaros	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

Do you have an explanation for your TA non-believer status? As buy and hold SUNW longs, we've seen quite a few fellows blow through here as TA true believers. They aren't here any longer. They must have all made a killing and moved on to the reclusive millionaires thread? -JCJ

To: Steve Lee who wrote (27766)	2/15/2000 8:09:00 AM
From: JDN	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

Dear Steve Lee: You didnt ask for it but I will give you my opinion of this T/A etc. IMHO in the past the only true way to invest was through the study of Fundamentals of a company. That is true today but because the market has changed an understanding of T/A certainly can enhance ones returns even over the long term. Why, because today the market is primarily, again IMHO, momentum driven. With the advent of on line trading commissions are nearly nil, information available to the individual trader is voluminous, and the "Day Trader" concept has sprung up to take over an incredible %age of the day to day volume in the market. Day traders and many momentum traders rarely look at a companies fundamentals, rather its price/volume action. T/A in its purest sense really just is a study of price/volume data. So for the investor, if he incorporates at least some knowledge of T/A into his fundamental analysis of a Company I believe that he can enhance his gains by either buying lower or selling higher than he might otherwise have done. JDN