I'm tired of reading "I'd have made more but I made mistakes."

Stop blaming personal mistakes for the fact that the market moved against you. It's as if the minute something didn't go to plan, suddenly you miscounted the Gann Movements or put the Fib on the wrong peak and valley.

Just suck it up and say "nobody really knows what they are doing...." ;-)

^this

Nope thats not true....

I am tired of this saying too for I used to say this too.
One way to remove this mistake is stay connected to the market if a trade is open. Otherwise use some indicator with signals or an EA for help. Usually when a trade is going very good, beware something bad is about to happen.

To state the obvious, nobody can forecast the market with 100% accuracy. Hence there will always be losing trades, no matter now experienced or skilled one is. It only takes one large order to upset even the 'best' technical strategy.

In every situation, if you look long enough, and from enough different timeframes and angles, you'll find at least a dozen valid TA-based reasons to buy, and a dozen reasons to sell (e.g. one trader might be entering what he sees as a strong uptrend, while another sees the same chart as being overbought). That's what makes any market work: willing buyer, willing seller. The proficient trader is somehow able to weigh up these reasons, and build an on-balance profitable system around them.

Once you have a trading plan with an edge, the only "mistake" you can make is to trade contrary to your plan. Losses are not mistakes, they are the occasional and inevitable consequence of exposing oneself to risk.

David

This is a golden expression.

IMO, to understand the message thus far --

Combining these apparently contradictory statements:
If each reason is 100% valid, regardless of what % of the market it calls, and includes enough room for the risk each reason needs, then its trade will work.
Also, if there are that many easily obtainable reasons for every trade, then there also exists, as has been stated, a well-balanced approximation across them that captures the market's true movement. This super-validity, likely a spotty thing, can at times approach HGdom.
A chart study's job is to include all bars, whatever the size.
In light of the above, however, this is not often practical.

If you lose when trading contrary to your plan, then you made a mistake. If you lose through the market entering the risk the trade took into account, then you made an honest trade and lost.

I've seen multiple threads/posts from you along these lines, and as always, I disagree completely.

Quite tired of reading it, too.

You really are incrediblle... and not in a good way!

You're right... the underlying theme is that any TA system does not carry a measurable edge. I will never retract this statement. I have several systems that were extremely profitable for years, and suddenly blew up without warning.

Just read this blog: http://www.grailtrading.blogspot.com/

I remember when Soultrader (the author of the blog) was selling this system for $5K / pop. Now it is on the scrap heap of systems that had a nuclear meltdown.

And for the record, I never broached the subject of how I was tired of people blaming themselves for bad trades. That's a new one for me.

I just mean the 'nobody really knows what they're doing' part. Clearly there are many traders who 'know what they're doing'. They may not be right 100% of the time, but you wouldn't call a team who wins 8/10 games a loser, would you? I agree that most don't know what they're doing

Yeah, I believe that the conventional patterns and indicators people tend to think of when referring to technical analysis don't possess much edge.

Unfortunately, the way I think most approach TA is that they are taught that there are certain chart patterns or indicators which say you should take _____ action when _____ condition occurs. However, they don't have any grasp of the underlying market action that is causing some pattern or price action to form, or some indicator to... uhh, indicate? One of the easiest examples I can think of is trying to sell an overbought stoch or RSI in a strong uptrend-- you're going to get burned, because for the most part all those indicators do is measure price relative to where it has been in X period. Tends to work well in a ranging market, gets slaughtered in a trending market.

I think one of the best things a new trader who wants to study the charts could do is to learn some of the basic repeating patterns; double tops, triangles, wedges, etc. and focus equally as much on when they don't work as when they do work. I think you'll find that there are a lot of 'failed patterns' that are basically patterns of their own and can be traded just as well, if not better than conventional patterns, and a lot of that has to do with the way the markets flow.

Take triangles for example: you are supposed to trade the breakout of one of the diagonals. But look at some examples of uptrends and triangles; they tend to actually dip below the bottom diagonal a lot of the time before shooting up, and a conventional TA trader is going to try to sell that break. It won't work. Maybe there is stop hunting for the weak hands who got long at the base of the triangle, maybe there's been a respite in buyers and the big orders are looking to get long at a discount price. Whatever it is, there's always a reason why any particular pattern forms, and that's what is most important-- not the pattern itself. The pattern is just showing you where potential entries are.

Evidence: My TA curve fit system blew up.
Conclusion: Nobody knows what they are doing.

I'm sure there is a fallacy in there somewhere, I just can't quite put my finger on it.

Craig, the minute you can show me WHY your system accurately predicts it's conclusions, come back to the thread.

LOL *clutches head in dismay*

1. You're deliberately missing the point, you are the one who made the daft assertion in your original post, it's up to you to prove it.
2. Nobody is answering money questions in a public forum, whether this is because they can't or won't is immaterial from your point of view.

Systems dont necessarily need to predict

No??? Well this is news to me...

Yep, that's the one.