Dislikedbelieving is exactly the problem. What does believing mean? When I say sentences like: I believe in what he said, I believe in god, I believe the reports. What does that imply? I do NOT know, if what he said is true, if god exists, if the results in the reports are any good.
You don't wanna believe in systems to be good or not, you want to KNOW if a system is good or not. And that you only can do by verifying the results for yourself until belief turns into knowing.
I know it's semantics, but I think an important distinction.Ignored
You can never know. I understand from reading your previous posts that you have developed an automated system that appears to deliver you 50% return per anum. That's great and long may it continue for you. However, all you have developed is a system that you believe will bring you a positive expectancy based on nothing more than the fact that it has delivered it in the past. You've clearly done your due diligence and given yourself the best possible chance of this continuing into the future but you never will actually "KNOW". The market could fundamentally change shape and unless you change your system to account for this new shape to the market, your system could still fail.
I may be wrong here but I think I understand what the OP is getting at. I think he's suggesting that a long and arduous study of price action behaviour can give you such an understanding of price behaviour (based on whatever metric you use to study it) that your belief grows to a point that you can trade with a certain level of confidence that your decisions will be more right than wrong. This helps massively with the psychological aspect of manual trading because you have confidence that your decisions are sound more than they are wrong. With this approach, even if the markets do begin to metamorphosise into a different beast, it'll still be impossible to hide the shift in sentiment from the trained and educated eye.