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Pastimes : Triffin's Market Diary -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Triffin who wrote (113)	4/15/2000 11:44:00 AM
From: Triffin	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 869

BC: TA COMMENTS This was a PM I sent to someone awhile ago .. ---------------------------------------------------- I've been using TA for 30 years .. Any indicator that is 'price derived' ( hint: they all are ) is doomed to 'follow price' rather than 'lead price' .. ie the indicators don't have any predictive value better than 50/50 from flipping a coin .. The problem is that when looking at a chart our 'eyes' see the chart patterns where the signal/indicator 'worked' but for the most part miss the set-ups where the indcator failed .. MACD/ADX/stochastics/moving average oscillators etc etc will all turn - up and confirm a 'buy signal' only when the 'price' does in fact rise .. this has no predictive value .. In general any TA buy signals/indicators will 'work' while prices in general are rising .. at the same time TA sell signals/indicators will be getting you out early and or causing losses if you are using them to initiate short trades .. The opposite effect will occur when prices are generally falling .. I've spent years of my life "Holy Grail Hunting" for consistently profitable mechanical trading systems .. They just aren't out there .. If they truely worked outfits like Goldman Sachs, major hedge funds etc would have figured it out and 'own' the world at this point .. The best one can do IMHO is to have a set of TA tools for use in bull and bear markets and attempt to match the tools with the present micro-market environment; still a tall task .. Jim in CT .. EOM ------------------------------------------------------