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I know people on this forum have a strong aversion to the academic side of trading so if you would, "Rather make money than talk about it", then please see other threads.
Anyway, according to random walk theory and the efficient market hypothesis day to day price movements are random. Therefore making all technical indicators useless as past prices have zero effect over the probablilities of future price movements. Then tech/a people counter that by saying the markets cant be random because they trend and yes, the trend is your friend. Then that gets countered by a demonstration of a random data model with stochastic distrubution, fat tails and other statistical jargon showing clear trends in the random data.
Then in comes mandelbroit with his fractal theories ect but they are in such beginning stages to be un usable for day to day practical purposes.
Now, i figured that the best way to settle this would be to back test each indicator over years and years worth of historical data across many different markets to see if the indicators do have any predictability elements. I then found this book:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/cu...omer-reviews.sort_by=-SubmissionDate&n=283155
Which did all the statistical work for me and it is shown that 6400 technical indicators turned out to be useless.
So how do people make money with tech/a? The answer is that millions of people use tech/a with proper money management. Out of that many people doing it there are bound to be a small percentage of winners from luck and a large amount of losers which would make sense of the often quoted statistic that 90% of traders lose money.
So is it fair to conclude that successful chartists are just luckier than their fellow losing chartists?
I meant no offence by this thread and am not interested in hearing people defend their egos because they cant accept the possibility that what they have been doing all these years was a total waste of time.
All opinions and counter arguments are greatly welcomed, lets just try not get personal.
Kind regards,
onemind
Anyway, according to random walk theory and the efficient market hypothesis day to day price movements are random. Therefore making all technical indicators useless as past prices have zero effect over the probablilities of future price movements. Then tech/a people counter that by saying the markets cant be random because they trend and yes, the trend is your friend. Then that gets countered by a demonstration of a random data model with stochastic distrubution, fat tails and other statistical jargon showing clear trends in the random data.
Then in comes mandelbroit with his fractal theories ect but they are in such beginning stages to be un usable for day to day practical purposes.
Now, i figured that the best way to settle this would be to back test each indicator over years and years worth of historical data across many different markets to see if the indicators do have any predictability elements. I then found this book:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/cu...omer-reviews.sort_by=-SubmissionDate&n=283155
Which did all the statistical work for me and it is shown that 6400 technical indicators turned out to be useless.
So how do people make money with tech/a? The answer is that millions of people use tech/a with proper money management. Out of that many people doing it there are bound to be a small percentage of winners from luck and a large amount of losers which would make sense of the often quoted statistic that 90% of traders lose money.
So is it fair to conclude that successful chartists are just luckier than their fellow losing chartists?
I meant no offence by this thread and am not interested in hearing people defend their egos because they cant accept the possibility that what they have been doing all these years was a total waste of time.
All opinions and counter arguments are greatly welcomed, lets just try not get personal.
Kind regards,
onemind