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Indicators are liars

  #51 (permalink)
 
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 stephenszpak 
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cpi65 View Post
Sorry dude but I don't really see what you are getting at here - at all.

I'm talking about that long red candle on the chart you posted, and you said "support was found at the bottom".

I disagree. I think anyone calling the low/close of that candle as support must be smoking crack or summit. Look at it, what on earth is supportive about that candle? the fact that it closed??!!!!

Support was found there (at about 10,060) because that's where the prices stopped going down, even
though prices COULD have gone down farther. The open of the next day, hypothetically now, could be much
higher or lower, with prices moving strongly in whatever direction after the open.

It seems we'll have to agree to disagree on this one,

- Stephen

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  #52 (permalink)
 
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 Fat Tails 
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aztrader9 View Post
I don't believe in the black magic or harmonic laws either, but order in seemingly random chaos I do believe in. That's the beauty of two differing view points. Your use of a "self fulfillment prophecy" reinforces my belief system and in turn contributes to the re-enforcing prophecy theory. Its wonderful, I benefit and so do you from my belief in order in chaos theory.

My view point happens to come from my personal world view that assumes there is order and universal principals throughout nature despite the apparent randomness and the order and universal laws like gravity, the laws of motion, etc, stem from at a minimum, intelligent design as opposed to the theory that everything sprang from a random explosion which by its very nature promotes destruction and disorder instead of creativity and order.

In the final analysis, it is immaterial whether or not one believes in the universal law theory or not, what is important is that the belief exists and many people use them to guide trading. That fact alone is sufficient evidence for me to continue to use them. I think people use them in many different ways which would tend to promote a degree of randomness in the outcomes they produce since in the fib world, every single tick of price movement is a fib number of some larger time frame and this will cause an exponential diffusion of outcomes.

I try to use them in more of a macro manner since using fibs in a more granular level is possible but time consuming and somewhat inefficient in my opinion. Thats why I use the dynamic fib lines for the daily range and a MA for some confirmation. Then the daily range fibs act as possible targets as well as possible S/R. Time will tell if I am right nor not.

The fib world is a bit of wishful thinking and search for harmony. Human behaviour. Such as the statement attributed to Einstein that "God does not play dice". What, if playing dice is part of the plan. What if the random element is required to improve the design?

The fib universe is a closed system. Everything interrelates and fits nicely. The proportion of the larger wave in relation to the proportion of the smaller wave reflects the proportions of the wave itself. Such a beauty, such a regular structure. It is called Golden Cut. Inspiring. The pyramids show the golden cut. Probably just by chance. You will also find Pi wihtin the pyramids. Not by chance, because the guys have used some ropes to measure diameters. Nature does rarely offer such a regularity.

The point is that our mind, so trained in analogy and reduction wants order, just to reduce its use of brain RAM. The brain uses anchoring and heuristics to create an image of the utter world. Sun will rise today, because it rose yesterday. Repetitive structures such as fib retracements provide less information than the market itself contains. So our mind starts playing tricks on us, reducing information content, finding patterns, where there are no patterns to find. Irregularity becomes regularity, as to fit the information into our heads. Everything that does not fit is noise. A telephone directory contains more information than a poem. Why? Because the information is not correlated. So the telephone directory is more difficult to learn by heart than the poem. Well, I am sure that I can find you some fib patterns in the telephone book as well.

Marxism is a concept that largely simplifies social and economic life for those who can not accept its real dimension. Also it raises the hope of the poor and unsuccessful. Your time will come! Practicing marxists reduce real economics to the concepts suggested by Marx to a point that you cannot even discuss with them, because they cannot think outside of the categories implanted in their minds. Sounds a bit like Elliot Wave Theory. Marxism ignores that many elements of the theory are contradictory to empirical findings. Elliot Wave Theory ignores that statistical research has shown no significant arguments in favor of the waves proportions. So there you have two self-fulfilling prophecys, fads both with a limited lifespan. There is only a small step from Marxism to Wave Theory, to Dianetics or to Nazism.

Go ahead with religion. A common need for all of us to socialize the feedback loop created by our understanding that we are living creatures. My dog never saw himself in the mirror, but saw another dog, guess he became his virtual friend on the other side for occasional eye chats. We mirror ourselves and need an explanation. Going back to Spinoza, who discovered that God was subject of that feedback process and called him the cause of the last instance. Other focussing more on the details became Dschihadist or Crusaders, Fundamentalists or Creationists. Not really helpful.

Why is all this related to trading? Because we are permanently confronted with complex creatures showing up from nowhere, and then the answer that The Market has created this wave in Seven Days comes along because that is the answer that we want to see or hear.

The fib concept is incompatible with the multitude of feedback mechanisms created by the market participants and the auction process as well as external shocks transmittedd bynews. But collective blindness creates self-fulfilling prophecies and in the end it is rational irrationality to follow them, to follow fibs or to follow the predominant religion of your home country.

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  #53 (permalink)
 Twiddle 
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Could not agree more with your post above Fat Tails.

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  #54 (permalink)
 
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Fat Tails View Post
The fib world is a bit of wishful thinking and search for harmony. Human behaviour. Such as the statement attributed to Einstein that "God does not play dice". What, if playing dice is part of the plan. What if the random element is required to improve the design?

The fib universe is a closed system. Everything interrelates and fits nicely. The proportion of the larger wave in relation to the proportion of the smaller wave reflects the proportions of the wave itself. Such a beauty, such a regular structure. It is called Golden Cut. Inspiring. The pyramids show the golden cut. Probably just by chance. You will also find Pi wihtin the pyramids. Not by chance, because the guys have used some ropes to measure diameters. Nature does rarely offer such a regularity.

The point is that our mind, so trained in analogy and reduction wants order, just to reduce its use of brain RAM. The brain uses anchoring and heuristics to create an image of the utter world. Sun will rise today, because it rose yesterday. Repetitive structures such as fib retracements provide less information than the market itself contains. So our mind starts playing tricks on us, reducing information content, finding patterns, where there are no patterns to find. Irregularity becomes regularity, as to fit the information into our heads. Everything that does not fit is noise. A telephone directory contains more information than a poem. Why? Because the information is not correlated. So the telephone directory is more difficult to learn by heart than the poem. Well, I am sure that I can find you some fib patterns in the telephone book as well.

Marxism is a concept that largely simplifies social and economic life for those who can not accept its real dimension. Also it raises the hope of the poor and unsuccessful. Your time will come! Practicing marxists reduce real economics to the concepts suggested by Marx to a point that you cannot even discuss with them, because they cannot think outside of the categories implanted in their minds. Sounds a bit like Elliot Wave Theory. Marxism ignores that many elements of the theory are contradictory to empirical findings. Elliot Wave Theory ignores that statistical research has shown no significant arguments in favor of the waves proportions. So there you have two self-fulfilling prophecys, fads both with a limited lifespan. There is only a small step from Marxism to Wave Theory, to Dianetics or to Nazism.

Go ahead with religion. A common need for all of us to socialize the feedback loop created by our understanding that we are living creatures. My dog never saw himself in the mirror, but saw another dog, guess he became his virtual friend on the other side for occasional eye chats. We mirror ourselves and need an explanation. Going back to Spinoza, who discovered that God was subject of that feedback process and called him the cause of the last instance. Other focussing more on the details became Dschihadist or Crusaders, Fundamentalists or Creationists. Not really helpful.

Why is all this related to trading? Because we are permanently confronted with complex creatures showing up from nowhere, and then the answer that The Market has created this wave in Seven Days comes along because that is the answer that we want to see or hear.

The fib concept is incompatible with the multitude of feedback mechanisms created by the market participants and the auction process as well as external shocks transmittedd bynews. But collective blindness creates self-fulfilling prophecies and in the end it is rational irrationality to follow them, to follow fibs or to follow the predominant religion of your home country.

Fat Tails,

I do enjoy your thought process and your writing. I agree with some of your conclusions as well as analysis.

While I did mention intelligent design, I don't remember mentioning religion anywhere. Religion has been a source of trouble and oppression for centuries. Used by the powerful to enslave the masses. Hence Marx's famous statement about religion. It is true. Religion is the opium of the masses.

And yes, religion is very similar to our search for the holy grail of indicators. It is related to trading, as all of us would like to reduce the complexity of the markets to something simple enough that we can explain it to our 8 year old just as we use religion to explain what we don't understand.

The trouble I find with those that don't "believe" is the tendency to look at those who do with a sense of superiority and condescension. As though the non-believers are somehow more sophisticated, smarter and more informed and the believer (in whatever the non believer takes issue with) is just stupid. This seems to me to demonstrate the type of close mindedness reminiscent of many religious institutions.

This thread is about how indicators are liars. And we are talking about religion, Marxism, etc. I suspect that many people would discount the current discussion as irrelevant to trading but I think it makes sense. A persons world view, (believer or non believer) will affect to some degree, his or her philosophical approach to trading.

I think fibs work because of my world view. You think they work because of the idea of self fullfilling prophecy. Other people rely on entirely different sets of indicators for their own reasons.

In the end, I choose not to use other indicators because they do not fit with my philosophical approach to trading. While I am not an expert in any of the things we've discussed nor am I yet a trader rolling in money, I am self aware enough to know that multiple oscillators, divergence indicators and the like will not fit with me.

I think that's the point of the thread. Indicators are liars unless you find one that fits with your personality and trading philosophy. Then it will tell you the truth you want or need to see. In that regard, one man's truth is another man's lie.

A great example of this is all the hucksters out there selling indicators and systems. These systems and indicators work for them, or at least they say they do. But they don't work for the hapless purchaser. Why? Because they have no blood, sweat or tears in them. They don't really trust them because they did not build the system themselves.

This is why @Big Mike is always talking about having to really own your system or method. Only then will you trust it.

So what difference does it make if I think all indicators are liars if one of them actually works for you or someone else? If it works, it works. Whom am I to disparage your success with something I find impossible to decipher and maybe even find childish? And vice versa. That's what is great about this business. If you take the time to master something, a million different people can be trading a million different ways and all be successful. There is no one way to succeed.

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  #55 (permalink)
 
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Aztrader,

thanks for your post. I really enjoyed reading it and would sign any of the statements without hesitation.

You have correctly perceived - although I have not said it explicitly - that I am a bit sceptical on the subject of intelligent design. First of all intelligent design works differently as expected. Currently, homo sapiens is not the pride of creation, but something like a plague that has overcome the planet.How could intelligent design have lead to such a creature? Alos there are paralllels with trading: homo sapiens, the wise or knowing human - sounds like a trader who has happily reaped some profits and now esteems himself being the master of the world. However, the master is the market and not the trader, and whe all know the where pride and overestimation of one's own capabilities leads to. The ancient Greek called this hybris. Hybris is a product of reinforcement of one's own convictions, it is genuinely produced by positive feedback. Our traditional moral system is designed to protect us against hybris. Religion plays its role in that game.

Now does the market follow an intelligent design? In the first place there are technical rules that define the way agents participate in the market place. These rules are simple and can be observed in many fields where a larger number of agents participate. But the rules have nothing to do with intelligence. Watch the movemements of a fish school. One can mdoel the turns and twists of the swarms by just defining how a fish reacts to its direct neighbours. The intelligence is not the set of rules, but rather the second dimension, how those rules can be changed. To change rules you need random elements, or let us call them errors. How would the evolution of the species be possible, if reproduction did not allow for errors? How can a trader be profitable, when always repeating the same setups? Setups exploit the behaviour of other traders and they can be exploited themselves. At some point they will stop working and the trader blows up. Richard Dennis, famous turtle breeder, retired when trend following strategies stopped working. Sounds similar to evolution of species. Over 99.9% of all species are extinct, I would also sign the statement that over 99.9% of all trading strategies do not work any more.

To further understand the parallels between the evolution of trading strategies and the evolution of species, read Robert Axelrod's books The evolution of cooperation and The complexity of cooperation. Or play a bit around with Sugarscape Sugarscape - Growing Agent-based Artificial Societies, which is an agent based model to grow artificial societies.

Intelligent design is evolutionary. Intelligence also is a collective property. Multi-agent systmes can exhibit intelligent behaviour. Interesting thriller on this subject: Frank Schatzing, The Swarm. Whether the intelligent design was intended or not can be debated. Intelligence itself looks like a very human way to measure the behaviour of complex systems. I cannot get rid of the impression that so-called intelligence is a property that measures the correlation between a complex system and the way our own minds work.


aztrader9 View Post
The trouble I find with those that don't "believe" is the tendency to look at those who do with a sense of superiority and condescension. As though the non-believers are somehow more sophisticated, smarter and more informed and the believer (in whatever the non believer takes issue with) is just stupid. This seems to me to demonstrate the type of close mindedness reminiscent of many religious institutions.

One note here: The non-believers are believers as well. Their superiority is derived from another set of beliefs. The marxist critizing religion has a set of beliefs as strong as the Christian fundamentalist. So he simply adheres to a pseudo-religion. Looks like beliefs are part of our heuristics system that takes over, when the brain is confronted with a complex problem that cannot be solved. Feedback loops created by the statement "Cogito, ergo sum" would usually lead to a mind crash, as there is no answer to the question. The belief acts as the ultimate circuit breaker. Also let me put it this way, if you are a believer, this increases the odds that you are a counter trader.

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Fat Tails View Post

One note here: The non-believers are believers as well. Their superiority is derived from another set of beliefs. The marxist critizing religion has a set of beliefs as strong as the Christian fundamentalist. So he simply adheres to a pseudo-religion. Looks like beliefs are part of our heuristics system that takes over, when the brain is confronted with a complex problem that cannot be solved. Feedback loops created by the statement "Cogito, ergo sum" would usually lead to a mind crash, as there is no answer to the question. The belief acts as the ultimate circuit breaker. Also let me put it this way, if you are a believer, this increases the odds that you are a counter trader.

Fat Tails,

I am obviously locked in a death struggle with my mental superior. But I have this to say about being a skeptic. It is perfectly fine to be a skeptic, dismissive on the other hand is rude....You've not been rude. Thanks for that.

Finally someone recognizes Marxism for what it is: pseudo-religion....along with all the other "ism's" out there. And currently, I'm ok with a mental circuit breaker for the really complex stuff. I like to think but at some point, my humble brain says no more......a certain amount of faith is ok with me. Me in intelligent design, others in Marxism.....well, no so much in the Marxism stuff....

I like my fibs. They like me. At least they keep telling me they do.......What more can I say!

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  #57 (permalink)
 
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aztrader9 View Post
Fat Tails,

I am obviously locked in a death struggle with my mental superior. But I have this to say about being a skeptic. It is perfectly fine to be a skeptic, dismissive on the other hand is rude....You've not been rude. Thanks for that.

Finally someone recognizes Marxism for what it is: pseudo-religion....along with all the other "ism's" out there. And currently, I'm ok with a mental circuit breaker for the really complex stuff. I like to think but at some point, my humble brain says no more......a certain amount of faith is ok with me. Me in intelligent design, others in Marxism.....well, no so much in the Marxism stuff....

I like my fibs. They like me. At least they keep telling me they do.......What more can I say!

Yep. Using fibs as well. Preferably confluence lines, see chart below with my favourite indicators. Shows 3 confluence lines and trading ranges detected by my range indicator.


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If we are going to get into philosophy: there are two types I can quickly identify: those that want their model of the world verified and seekers of truth.

Model of the worlders make everything fit their model of the world.

Examples: Religion, extreme left & right wingers.

Seekers of truth allow new information to influence their decisions and are constantly iterating their model to fit the solution demonstrated by experimental method.

Examples: Open minded traders - the kind that Mark Douglas suggests you emulate.

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  #59 (permalink)
 
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ZTR View Post
If we are going to get into philosophy: there are two types I can quickly identify: those that want their model of the world verified and seekers of truth.

Model of the worlders make everything fit their model of the world.

Examples: Religion, extreme left & right wingers.

Seekers of truth allow new information to influence their decisions and are constantly iterating their model to fit the solution demonstrated by experimental method.

Examples: Open minded traders - the kind that Mark Douglas suggests you emulate.

JMTC

Thanks for pointing this out. I love that expression "Model of the worlders". Makes me immediately think about economists. All those equilibrium models that satisfy the needs of our rational minds, but which have little in common with reality. It also applies to traders which are being caught on the wrong side of the market.

It was the philosopher Karl Popper, who defined what is a seeker of truth. Behind is the problem of induction already emphasized by David Hume. If the sun rises every morning, you may assume - your model - that the sun will rise tomorrow. This is a theory that remains valid until it is falsified. The first observation that the sun did not rise will lead to a new model. That is exactly what you call iteration.

In your words the theory of relativity would be a reiteration of classical physics.

Popper also unmasked marxism and psychoanalysis as pseudo-sciences.

Seems that everything you stated is based on the work of Karl Popper. Have you read his books "The Logic of Scientific Discovery" and "Conjectures and Refutations"?

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Fat Tails View Post
Thanks for pointing this out. I love that expression "Model of the worlders".
Seems that everything you stated is based on the work of Karl Popper. Have you read his books "The Logic of Scientific Discovery" and "Conjectures and Refutations"?

You give me much more scholarly credit than I am due. I am a trained experimental research scientist, very pragmatic and eccentric (the medical definition - thinks partially in pictures, not the vernacular usage - meaning a little off), so I use both right and left parts of my brain. Believe that make me much more open minded. Plus I live in San Francisco where open mindedness is welcome (unless it goes against someone's political beliefs)

I came up with the Model of the Worlders, when I was forced to listen to Rush Limbaugh. Long story short, My Father-in-Law was dying of leukemia (before I realized I had it) and my wife was taking care of him. He listened to Rush all day. I began a debate with him about Truth seekers vs Model of the Worlders. It was a spirited battle. But it really make me think about how a person's preconceived notions shapes reality. The cliché is that perception is Reality.

Certainly holds when a position goes against you.

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