Seems you're really determined to call me out. I'll try again - apologies in advance if I seem to be playing a different game than the one you seem to prefer.
One of the main reasons that I'm critical of Hahn and securitytrader, among others, and that I try to err on the conservative side in making predictions of my own, is that my own memory of being a beginner desperate for guidance is still fresh. I recall very well what it was like to be surfing around looking for insight on some ill-considered speculative investment I'd made, running across someone who seemed to know what he or she was talking about, and being led down a blind alley. You may be too experienced and too successful to remember how vulnerable novices can be to people who really do seem to know what they're talking about. I myself just happened to avoid irreparable or truly severe losses along the way, but I think people should be a lot more careful with their rent money than many seem to be. I'll confess further that, once I began to accumulate a bit of knowledge and superficial sophistication, I managed, in my own limited way, to be one of those misleaders - in effect encouraging others to head down those blind alleys with me.
As for Hahn and sectrader in particular--one more time: What I particularly don't like about their work is their practice of drawing lines on charts, attaching terms, and producing dramatic (to my mind sensationalistic) "measuring targets" without referring to volume patterns and without hewing to the definitions whose authority (i.e., classic T.A.) they appear to be implicitly invoking. (They're far from alone in this practice, by the way.) The danger or at least the unreliability of such work seemed especially clear to me when the recent Dow rally led each analyst to revise or begin to revise predictions and observations relating to the supposed Dow Diamond, which was the main subject of our previous discussion. Though Hahn left his downside target of Dow 7000 in place, he began to hedge, and even to contradict himself (even his syntax began to deteriorate): Dow 7000 seemed to become just another if-you-choose-to-believe possibility rather than HIS working/predicted target. Around that same time, it seemed that securitrytrader.com's similar INDU chart became briefly unavailable, then at least temporarily appeared in revised form (no diamond, no big red warning sign). Regardless of how things turn out, both analysts are now in a position to claim to have been more or less correct, or, at worst, to have been incompletely wrong.
As for my own performance as an analyst, I'm even more aware of my own limitations than I am skeptical (a lot) of anyone else's prophetic powers. I do believe that, having relied on a combination of Edwards&Magee, candlestick analysis, and bits of borrowed Bollinger and Bloch, I was one of the few, if not the only, post'er on the MDD board to suggest a short-term bottom had been put in place in October on, e.g., the Comp and the Sox, but my statements were made without prejudice as to long-term MD, and, anyway, I certainly don't consider one decent, tentative, circumscribed semi-call to be anything to brag about.
My read on the market at the moment is - again, sorry to disappoint you - that it's pretty hard to read. The major indices as well as my favorite trading vehicles are all showing high volatility, near-deafening noise, and risk in all directions (not just up or down, but both in whipsawing combination, with the possibility of a new basing/sideways period also not to be excluded). In short, the market would have to show me a lot before I'd feel good about becoming an "investor" again, or about employing an intermediate trend- or breakout-oriented system, or even, for that matter, about devoting very much time to reading the directional tea leaves. About the only methods that have proved very useful to me recently have relied on very short-term swing trading tactics, and the idea, which I first ran across in the work of Laurence Connors, that short-term volatility tends to be more persistent and therefore more tradable than short-term price direction.
Since I've already gone on longer than I originally intended, I'll invite you to PM me if you want more specifics at some later time. |
