Early on into my trading career I came to the conclusion that most traders just trade what they "think" will happen... and I found that funny because why would the market care what you think? it doesn't. Your thoughts don't affect the market and hence I thought this made no sense. When I understood this I understood that in order to be a successful trader you need a successful trading system (an objective rule based system).
Currently there is this hype over "objective trading" but with a lot of pain and effort I found out that hardly anybody (99.9%) of traders have an objective edge, and that profitable traders don't really have an edge on the market but they are the edge. How can the trader be the edge? Well I believe that it's down to how lucky they are as an individual because they have no objective means of an edge, they just do subjective things and somehow they end up being profitable.
What subjective things would a profitable trader do?
- Change position sizes depending on how they feel
- Cut positions early depending on how they feel
- Let positions run depending on how they feel
- Take some opportunities and skip out on others depending on how they feel
There's probably a few more possibilities but these are a few I could think of. But these are all completely subjective things that traders do and with luck on their side doing these things can let them be profitable traders.
At this point I don't believe that the majority of "profitable" traders have an edge on the market. They only edge they really have is how lucky they are.
There's no TA system that "just works" or has a statistical edge on the market. Most of the "systems" on FF don't even have any statistical evidence towards their success. The statistics aren't even being measured so how do all these system providers even know their "system" has an edge!
If there are traders with statistical edges on the market... they are probably not doing the work manually and are using code and algorithms to crunch up the data and gather real statistical data... they don't just look at charts and assume they have found an edge.