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I want to test something. It's simple. Place some random lines on your chart prior to the day opening, and see if at the end of the day you feel like those lines were important (try to imagine they weren't random, but some expensive or complicated indicator instead).
I want to make it clear: the point is not that these lines are important or significant in any way. The point is that your mind will THINK that they are!!! So if your mind can think these lines are important, what is your mind thinking about the rest of your indicators that you believe are not random...
Here is my 5m CL chart with my other stuff removed. This is before the open, so what you are seeing is from last week. But the blue horizontal lines are what I have added just now.
I picked the lines as randomly as I could. I only saw what you see on my chart (I didn't look at historical data).
Let the test begin... I will post again at the end of the day. If you guys want to participate please post a clean/empty chart prior with your random lines on it prior to the day's action, then make a second post after the fact so we can see if the lines had any "impact".
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Well I am trying to demonstrate how so many traders look at indicators as "holy grails", assigning properties to them they do not possess -- such as the ability to predict price.
Let's just see if these random lines have look at all useful after the fact. Will check it for several days. The point being, if you didn't know they were random and price does seem to "interact" with the lines, then you might assign properties to the lines (prediction) that simply don't exist. But since you do know they are random, how will that change your perception and behavior with your other indicators?
I also think that it is interesting but i think that knowing they are fake will take away confidence for yourself, so thereby i won't try this myself as i think you need to trick a part of your brain for that extra confidence
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The trick for my brain is to be as random as possible, actually if I look at Mike's chart I am influenced by
the Bars and it is difficult for me to trace a line without beeing minded to what I see, I think It would be easier on a blank chart.
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The object of the thread, for me, is to educate. I have made it clear the lines are random. Now if price seems to interact with these lines, you can imagine how people would feel if they did not know they were random. What if they were told it was an indicator with a fancy name and 200 lines of code? They start to "believe" it has predictive value.
That is the point. Education. Open your mind type thinking. Evaluate how you are looking at your own charts and how you describe the interactions of price and objects on your chart.
Then let's take a real object people use every day in their trading, namely the MACD. Ask people how they interpret the MACD and next how they could get free of it and trade without it but still get the same results if not better results. What does this object show you that you can't see without it ?
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You can start that new thread and discussion if you like, but I'd like to keep this thread about random lines or generalizations, nothing about a specific indicator.
I respect your goal very much and certainly don't want to be negative.
Unfortunately it won't be possible to demonstrate it this way.
It's just not possible to draw any lines "at random" regardless if the person that tries to do so is an educated trader or a newbie.
Especially interesting the postings of cavedave ("Humans cannot pick random numbers". Don't miss Shannon's "mind reading machine": http://www.cs.williams.edu/~bailey/applets/MindReader/) and Capt'n Midnight (with nice cartoon and other visualizations).
To overcome the problem it might be worthwhile and good enough to use a simple random number formula in Excel if only a horizontal line is needed.
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I had to close my eyes and plot the lines to make them random because I felt compelled to put them at "logical" levels . Ill check back after rollover tomorrow .
On the right, I just plugged in low and high (like 8800 and 9300) and then plotted the lines based on its output.
Here are the lines for day #2. These are prior to the open. Will update either during the day or after the close. These lines are 100% random, there is no chance I was "influenced" this time by logical levels.
I think that it is clear what you want to demonstrate and I agree. Our brain is hardwired for pattern recognition, and even when there is no pattern it will complete the picture to produce an analysis that shows some regularities.
However, by your demonstration, you do violate the law of large numbers. You need to repeat the process at least a hundred times to draw any conclusions, and I doubt that any of the members of the forum will support the pain to evaluate 100 charts with random lines.
Your first random chart, as it contains random lines, may well have lines that are not random at all. But let us have a look at your lines
90.73 -> although it looks like it acted as support (brain wash), price ignored this line and went down to 90.51. 90.51 however was a logical support level close to prior day's low, which was at 90.48. The fact that the bulls stepped in above prior day's low is a clear bullish signal.
91.27 -> this random level correctly predicted the high of the day LOL. Did you ask an old woman with a crystal ball, or was it by chance that one of your 5 levels chosen finally made it?
By observation I have noticed that some levels are used as exits which creates a first price reaction. The second approach sees an overshooting of price (bull trap or bear trap) before price reverses. In general, it is the first high or low that defines the support or resistance. In this case the first high was at 91.24 and the second high at 91.28. I actually had shorted the first high, because it was 50% retracement from the day's high in confluence with the main pivot, both at 91.21, so this random level fell together with a non-random level that works.
Random levels become tradeable levels, if there is a sufficiently large number of traders that uses them. Technical Analysis is a pseudo-science that mostly relies on self-fulfilling prophecy. In a way it is similar to the Keynesian beauty contest. You do not select the girl (S/R level) which is most beautiful, but the girl of which you think that the other agents think that all agent will think (n recursions -> find convergence level) that it is the most beautiful girl. This is subject to fads, so technical analysis means identifying the current fads that work.
I know that it was not your intention to discuss these levels, but just to show that our brains that have been hardwired by evolution, will trick us into pattern recognition and attribute a meaning to something which is meaningless. There is a number of cognitive biases related to this, including Clustering Illusion and Illusory Correlation.
Clustering Illusion
This is the tendency to erroneously perceive small random data samples as containing significant information, caused by a human tendency to underestimate the amount of variability that can appear in a small sample of random data. I remember that question about the birthday: If you have 25 randomly selected people invited for a party, what is the likelyhood that two of them have them have the same birthday (day of year)? The correct answer is 56.87%. It is actually more likely that there are at least two of them having the same birthday than otherwise. There is another study about basket ball players that shoot successfully in streaks - called the hot hand phenomenon. The so called hot hand however is a fallacy based on clustering illusion. It simply does not exist, as was shown by Gilovich, Vallone and Tversky.
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So far today, the random lines have predicted the opening price within 1 tick and the 30m opening range high/low within 1 tick.
I hope you guys do understand what I am trying to do here... we rationalize lines on a chart after-the-fact, that is what I am doing here, assigning value to them.
i think most 'guys' understand what you are trying to prove, ie, rationalize lines on a chart after-the-fact. But what are you going to do with this information ? How are you going to transform this information into actionable knowledge ? Are you gonna eliminate all lines on your chart ? No more support/resistance or diagonal trend lines on your chart ? No more channel ?
Do you consider the CCIPivot line projection you use on your chart in the same league as random lines ? Are you giving more weight to these lines ?
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I have zero intention of trying to make random lines useful.
What I am trying/attempting to demonstrate is the rationalization of lines on a chart. Some people attempt to assign value to these lines after-the-fact. So, now knowing the lines I have generated are random, and yet I can still easily assign the same values that someone would assign a non-random line, what does that tell you?
BTW, no I do not consider CCI Pivot random nor do I consider pivot points random. I do give them more weight than a random line. However, I firmly believe I give them much less weight (much, much, much less) than most traders who eagerly download them and place them on their chart, who then believe they have found an edge.
So to that point, I use the CCI Pivot as a way to frame the price, just like a moving average or etc. But I used to think differently. I used to think "only short when MA is down" and etc. In fact I still catch myself with those thoughts, and while I do firmly believe in trading with the trend, I don't think you can assign a black/white hard/fast rule to any indicator, even a simple moving average and a rule such as trade short when falling and long when rising.
What is interesting about this is it is food for thought about how ill defined most setups are that you read about.
Consider with these 5 lines, candle body/wick and no defined number of ticks for how close price needs to come to a line to have meaning..you basically have the entire chart area practically covered no matter where price goes without a massive trend.
On the other hand with tens of thousands of ticks per day, each being a potential trade you could be entering or exiting, a random line I would imagine is still better than nothing if only to act as a random filter.
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Now the session has closed.
What we can clearly see is how the first line predicted the day high within 1 tick, the third line the day low by 5 ticks, and the second line predicted the "point of control" as it were, where price battled against support and resistance all day.
Heres tomorrows lines . Now heres the thing - if a sample of say 100 trades off these levels produces a positive result what would it take to consider this a methodology ? What would it take to prove its not a methodology ?
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If you expect your method to encompass an edge, then it would seem basing the method on a truly random line is not beneficial except from the psychological side.
Maybe @Fat Tails or someone else can explore the methodology aspect. My intention was simply to demonstrate that a lot of traders put faith in their indicators, they seem to assign value to these indicators (like prediction). Now here we are in the process of demonstrating that a purely random line can be assigned those same values. What does that do to your belief that your own indicators are useful in the way that you once believed they were?
Imagine for a moment the title of this thread was "The Next Holy Grail?" and in the first post I told you that I labored for the past two years and have created this indicator which consists of 2,000 lines of code that I labored over day and night. Then I proceeded to post the same screen shots as you see in this thread, saying "Ok, here is what the indicator is showing for tomorrow". You could substitute "showing" for "predicting".
It wouldn't be a stretch. The thread would resemble many others. The thread would resemble what some vendors claim, for instance. The trick is seeing past that. You know the truth here -- they are random lines. How do you determine the "truth" for something else?
More to the point, some traders (myself included, although I hope I am learning) have a tendency of assigning after-the-fact properties. For example, pivots are a good candidate. I use them in my own trading after all. If price moves to a pivot, stops, and reverses, then I could easily say "that pivot was resistance". The difference naturally is the pivot is used by other traders. That exact same pivot. Enough traders that it becomes a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. Just like if thousands of traders suddenly started using the exact same random lines I post in this thread (exact to the tick the same), then price is likely to react on those lines.
We assign these properties thinking the line somehow carries weight or importance. Given what is shown in this thread, how do you feel about that?
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Here are five random lines for tomorrow. I used random.org and you can see I put 8800 to 9400 as my range (88.00 to 94.00). I then hit the button five times and plotted the lines. This is exact same as I did for todays range this morning. I am picking the 88 and 94 but I think any number of things could be used to set an outside limit like the one I am inventing.
I just want to reiterate that the lines I am showing here (89.22, 90.76, 91.38, 91.97, 92.48) are for the Wed Dec 29 session (tomorrow).
Volume is absent and by leaving behind half of the equation of what makes price move you can't achieve the full potential of the information or clues the market is providing. A car is useless without gasoline so are random lines of support/resistance without volume information. Eric J, i am afraid to tell you that your experiment is pure coincidence.
Euro FX Futures (Z10 CME) intraday: the upside prevails. Pivot: 1.3185
Our preference: Long positions above 1.3185 with targets @ 1.3275 & 1.3325 in extension.
Alternative scenario: Below 1.3185 look for further downside with 1.315 & 1.311 as targets.
Comment: the pair has struck against its resistance and is pulling back on its support ahead of a rebound.
You're probably right, by commenting and analysing the way you did, you appear 'AS IF' you were trading them. If you don't trade them then what is the purpose, if any, of this exercice. If you don't trade them then why putting lines on your chart ?
A practical exercice would be to fade a second test of a random line and see how much you could make by doing so over a certain period of time.
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I commented that way to be consistent with how I or others would comment on a chart with such lines without knowing the origin of the lines. I've discussed already in a few posts what the point is. Sorry if there is a language barrier but I am not sure how else to explain it to you, perhaps someone else can rephrase it.
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Try again tomorrow. I think what @Eric j has shown and my lines make it quite interesting.
For the benefit of @trendisyourfriend and probably others, I will attempt again to try and describe the point of the thread or my thinking behind such a thread.
I want people to look at these charts, look at the post analysis after the fact, and then ask themselves if they make similar analysis or rationale with any of their indicators -- seemingly assigning properties like predictive values to an indicator.
Then, knowing that what I am posting here is 100% random (proven), take a step back and ask yourself how that impacts your beliefs. What changes in your perceptions of your other indicators?
On this very forum you can find all kinds of indicators that plot lines on panel 1 of your chart. Lines for support and resistance, regions for price range, etc. When price does something with one of these lines, we tend to assign value to that. Should we? Look at the charts posted so far in this thread. Price "did something" with these lines, too. Imagine for a minute you did not know the lines were random. What would be so different from the charts in this thread compared to the charts in other threads?
The point is simply to get people to approach things from an angle they may not have previously considered, and hopefully in doing so they will benefit in some way and improve their trading.
Thanks Mike for taking the time to give a more elaborate answer and not take my previous comment at the first level as an attack or criticism. Your idea is to explore new angles in order to faciliate a paradigm shift or change in our basic assumptions. My objective this year is to trade without indicators or unnecessary luggage.
One of the thing i find interesting with comments many traders make about lines they draw on their charts is despite the fact they use it as potential inflection point they still feel the need to monitor price action around these levels before considering a trade. But what is the real use of a line if you need to watch price action before placing your bet on the table.
Let's take the volatility bands created by Fat Tails as an example, in another thread he wrote this is one of his best indicator so far but despite this fact i am sure he would not put a working order into one of the zone before price reaches that zone. He would probably wait a little bit more for signs that price is ready to turn or reverse. So common sense tells me that if you need to monitor price action when price reaches a zone why do you need these zones ?
If you don't need to put lines on your chart to give you some potential targets, is it possible that the risk:reward concept be a false preoccupation! To be profitable, do we need to predict or evaluate the reward as after all, lines we put on our charts are at the core of the preoccupation of most traders that believe in the risk/reward trusted enchilada recipe.
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I am not responding to random lines, because they cannot be used for trading. They are just a fallacy that was created deliberately and they may help to unveil other fallcies.
I will answer here to the usability of volatility bands.
The volatility bands are based on human behaviour. Trading is a game with ever the same participants, and the participation of these actors will create volatility and drive price up and down by a certain amount. This typical behaviour can be measured via the average daily range.
Now imagine that you had a climax bar followed by a second entry and you want to take a countertrade. I will place more confidence in this trade,
- if the average daily range has already been reached (near the bands)
- if the opportunity occurs outside my Keltner Channel (trading outside in)
- if the time of the day is a reversal time
and I might skip the signal, if the daily range has not yet reached it expected value.
By using the bands you simply increase the probability of your trade. And of course this reasoning applies to exits as well. A climax bar that ends near the bands gives you a clear signal to exit the trade.
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Heres tomorrows lines . No doubt that I could validate a random line as correlating to some point in the past either as a fib retracement or extension or a static SR level or myriad other things . It is quite difficult to randomly place a line on a chart and not have your eye automatically connect it to a level from the past .
These lines do not look random. If you ask me to draw S/R levels based on today's price action, I would find some of those lines - and that is not a fallacy.
The bands are just an average like any moving average and i have some difficulty to believe they increase the probability of any trade. When all items you mentionned converge or match your criterias, it may just be a coincidence that reinforces your belief in the bands and we are getting back to the core of this thread, namely that we assign specific properties to lines we put on our charts.
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You have to apply risk reward in terms of probabilities. Yes if you randomly go long with a risk of 2 points and a target of 5 points, you'll probably get your ass handed to you.
If the market trades its daily range, and you know historically that going back 5 years, that once it hits that range, it tends to traverse 60% of the time and reverse X amount of points, and you use good risk reward measure to enter, then I don't see why you can't make money, or at the minimum break even.
If you don't believe me, do it on sim for a month and see how it trades.
Fat tails, I'm developing a better way or signal you can add which gives you better results in terms of fading ADR bands. I'm still testing it, but if you want in, i wouldn't mind. I could probably use your help doing some back tests, bounce some ideas of each other anyways. Send me a pm and well talk
I am the first to admit that the risk/reward model works for some traders but i prefer to take a much easier path where i don't need to predict but just take whatever the market is willing to give. The risk/reward model is insidious in that you might feel the need to invent all kind of procedures to finetune your prediction. You kind of always feel there is one more step to reach as the future does not reveal itself that easily.
Its one lousy point, but it will make a huge differnce at the end of the month. Your first target essentially finances the second trade. Once you hit your +3, your no longer risking anything. When you say i take what i can get, your assuming you know whats going to happen, so you close it out before it goes against you. Its actually your method where you would probably need to fine tune your prediction, unless i'm misunderstanding the whole argument.
learn a lesson my last set of random lines was not suitable for this environment. So what to do? another set of random lines of course. and lunch time update. afternoon update. and final update and final final update. and one more.
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These are the same random lines from earlier this week, I haven't changed them as I've had my charts minimized for the most part and busy with other stuff.
But just want to point out how well price interacted with these lines today --- look at how they acted as support and resistance so well.
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Here are the random lines for Monday Jan 3. I hit the random button on random.org to make these within a range of 89.50 and 93.50 (roughly 200 ticks up and down of where price is now).
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And here is how the random lines, picked yesterday at complete random, have played out so far this morning. I sure hope you guys are having as much fun with this as I am.
I also hope that any assigned properties like "support" and "resistance" that you may assign to your own indicators are now being called into question, as you can see just how incredibly easy these random lines can appear to have the exact same properties.
maybe we should all switch to random lines trading
some random benefits;
- unclustered chart
- know far ahead where is you "s/r lines" thus giving you plenty of time to react
- at the same time you know they are random thus you are not emotionally involved in being right or wrong
- become a PA trader automatically
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It's pretty neat, right??
I hope it will drum up some conversation about the psychological impact of lines. What I mean is how we, the trader, and our minds end up assigning these properties to lines, like support and resistance. It is so easy to make those assumptions, to assign those values. And we can go into a lot of reasons why it makes sense to do so.
But then we have now several days of purely random lines that would seem to exhibit the same properties. To me, what this means is the lines are not important, what is happening is we are assigning importance to them. I mean, what else could it be?
I will keep going and keep posting daily charts so we can continue to gather some more samples. The results so far are very fun, at least.
I believe it was @Fat Tails that said that these lines are not important because they are just random, but other lines, like pivots, are not random and therefore carry more importance (or weight) because they are based on something that has logic behind it, or at least they are widely used which automatically assigns them more importance.
While I totally see the point of his argument and I even agree with it, hell I use pivots in my own trading, this entire thread really makes you question some of those beliefs.
@redratsal in the very beginning of the thread questioned whether or not we were exploring the Random Walk Theory, and maybe that is indeed exactly what we are doing. Are the markets random? It's an aged old debate, where I believe that the majority of people have a feeling of "The markets are somewhat random, but not completely random because they are driven by peoples actions".
But if people/traders are making trading decisions at random (which one could argue the majority of retail traders are), does that mean that since those decisions were random that the result ("the market") is also random? What I mean is that a lot of retail traders seem to have a plan or a system, a method, in place, but if you actually look at either what powers that method or at how the trader is actually executing on that method, I believe the results would be random. Maybe chaos is better than random.
This thread is only serious, if you are talking about pattern recognition failure of the human brain. As an alternative to your random lines I can just create a chart from a truly random price series, and every seasoned analyst will show you trendlines and areas of support and resistance on the chart.
Our brain reduces and organizes information to memorize it. It is not the real picture which is stored, but a projection. Every projection shows some regularities which are misinterpreted by our brains as being non-random.
However, building a strategy off random lines is child's play and a waste of time.
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Yeah the point is not creating a strategy around a random chart.
The point is how we react or perceive the random lines. If we remove the word random, and replace it with some fancy name, a lot of people would be wanting to know where they can download this new indicator.
At least for me -- and maybe I am the only one -- it makes it even more clear that the emphasis is less about "why" price is doing something, and more about simply "what" price is doing. The why is so unimportant, whether it be a pivot or a random line, a CCI indicator or MACD, all of that makes no difference because those things are no better than random.
So if the reason "why" to enter a trade is almost random, then all the importance is on what you do after the trade. I had reached similar conclusions well before creating this thread. And maybe I am imposing those prior conclusions on the thread itself, since no one is really agreeing with me.
Mike regarding this aspect, how do you handle a trade that gives you just enough ticks and then reverse giving you the choice to exit at break even ? Do you exit at break even or do you change your bias and reverse your position ? see example. This is a good case to illustrate the importance of what we do once in a trade. This is a fine line that decides if we make some profit or not.
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You can't always be right. When you enter a trade you should know your exit point ahead of time, the point in which you are wrong about the trade. I don't think it has too much to do with breakeven stuff (being right and wrong), the breakeven discussion is more of a money management tactic, and one I don't use.
@trendisyourfriend first that trade was a horrible trade you entered on a pullback against the trend i would never suggest anyone to take a trade like as its putting you into a contertrend trade late your asking for a losing trade when you do that,your 2nd entry should have been your trade not the first trade...sharky
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We all need a 'why' to enter. It is a bit worrying that a lot ( but I dont believe all) of the whys ( lines, indicators changing color etc) are no better than random given how much time we sweat over them lol. But the thing with a why is that it gives us some confidence to enter and to manage the trade according to our rules so it is very important subjectively even if it doesnt stand up to objective scrutiny.
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I think you misread me. I was not talking or even referring to being right or wrong. My comment pointed out that the line is fine between a profitable or losing trade and what separates both is how you react to a given situation. In other words, that's what you do in a timely fashion that determines your results. For the same situation or price action two traders could get two different results even if they enter at the same place and in the same direction.
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Easy to tell in hindsight. The trade was a valid setup where price is breaking a trendline, followed by a small pullback and a reversal bar in the direction of the breakout. I don't see anything horrible here.
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Thanx Mike , for some thing new to us.
Just for test, here i drew 5 random lines for 4-Jan session on NiftyFuture chart.
Will carry-out this for few days and post.
These numbers are generated from Random.Org and in sequence given.
God , how "Random" knew it has "some thing" upside ...its day, its moment, everything coincides with it. Cy
Harvest The Moon Nest The Market
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The diversity in analytic techniques, time frames, motivation, and perception of data, insures that the struggle between supply and demand will be lumpy over certain periods of time, which consequently leads to a non-linear effect on price. These price changes themselves affect traders’ perception of value. The result is a hyper-sensitive system, where various drivers of price have a chaotic effect on outcomes, and make prediction difficult.
Yet, if traders truly believed that the market did not follow a deterministic pattern, there would be no traders. Instead they choose to adhere to the principle that there is a relative probability that outcomes can be approximated. TA reflects the different psychological states of market participants, QA reflects the automated constraints of mean reversion, and in effect may be the strange attractors that allow us just enough an edge to profit.
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IMO the Random walk theory applies to longer time frames, if you are a day trader drawing and hitting your random lines is pure chance, the conclusions are purely subjective.
Courtesy of Investopedia
“Random walk theory gained popularity in 1973 when Burton Malkiel wrote "A Random Walk Down Wall Street", a book that is now regarded as an investment classic. Random walk is a stock market theory that states that the past movement or direction of the price of a stock or overall market cannot be used to predict its future movement. Originally examined by Maurice Kendall in 1953, the theory states that stock price fluctuations are independent of each other and have the same probability distribution, but that over a period of time, prices maintain an upward trend. In short, random walk says that stocks take a random and unpredictable path. The chance of a stock's future price going up is the same as it going down. A follower of random walk believes it is impossible to outperform the market without assuming additional risk. In his book, Malkiel preaches that both technical analysis and fundamental analysis are largely a waste of time and are still unproven in outperforming the markets.
Malkiel constantly states that a long-term buy-and-hold strategy is the best and that individuals should not attempt to time the markets. Attempts based on technical, fundamental, or any other analysis are futile. He backs this up with statistics showing that most mutual funds fail to beat benchmark averages like the S&P 500.
While many still follow the preaching of Malkiel, others believe that the investing landscape is very different than it was when Malkiel wrote his book nearly 30 years ago. Today, everyone has easy and fast access to relevant news and stock quotes. Investing is no longer a game for the privileged. Random walk has never been a popular concept with those on Wall Street, probably because it condemns the concepts on which it is based such as analysis and stock picking.
It's hard to say how much truth there is to this theory; there is evidence that supports both sides of the debate”
Random walk is just a model. If the model was correct, you would observe Gaussian distributions for lognormal prices.
In reality you will not find Gaussian distributions, so by using the terms of Karl Popper, the random walk theory has been falsified and can be refuted.
In particular, random walk theory does not allow for fat tails. Their existence is the explicit proof that you can make money as a technical trader.
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According to Karl Popper's falsiability assumption "... a theory should be considered scientific if and only if it is falsifiable...", therefore by asserting it is false you consider the Random walk a scientific theory
Let us say that the falsification is one of the conditions required for a scientific theory. But the reverse is not true, or would you consider anything that can be proven false to be a scientific theory?
But yes, the random walk concept - which is based on market efficiency - is a useful scientific theory. However, when the market behaves in line with its predictions, it is not easily tradeable.
The falsification of this theory was achieved by Benoit Mandelbrot, best shown in his book
The (mis)Behaviour of Markets - A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin and Reward
Worth reading. His work has been continued by a number of econo-physicists.
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Today is a good example why knowing where are important levels or even mathematical levels like daily pivots or natural levels like yesterday high, RTH High/Low etc. play a minor role in winning the game. The name of the game is patience (persevering in the face of delay) to wait for the easy to identify moves.
Pivotfarm uses zones of 1 point large to identify their key levels maybe you might like to define random zones instead of random lines to make your point even more convincing.
I have uploaded their TF chart for today at the bottom.
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Here are the results of the random lines picked yesterday. This is today's cash session.
I want to emphasize the lines are not being posted so you can trade them. The lines are random. Why would you want to trade them. The lines are being posted to challenge your beliefs about other lines that you DO trade, and the properties you assign those.
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Here are the lines for TOMORROW. 87.87, 88.38, 89.40, 89.92, 90.38. They were calculated at random.org by entering a minimum of 8750 and maximum of 9150, which is roughly 200 ticks above/below the closing price today.
First is that Richard Regan who is on CNBC and BLOOMBERG and runs that prop trading operation, has been shouting that pivot, and fibs and other mystic lines on a chart a BS.
Second, lines like Pivots and Fibs are usually good for a scalp because so many people are watching those levels and trading them (self fullfuling indicator in essance.)
And thrid, one might argue that since you know the CL so well, you might be subconscioulsy picking levels that have had significance for you in past trades, that you're not consciously aware of...
I am sure, at the end, Big Mike will realise that what counts is volume to gauge the usefulness of a level. All else is pure conjecture, guesstimate or even better a shot in the dark.
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I don't think I'm going to make that realization any time soon.
Price moves whether there is a little volume or a lot, and my stops and targets are based on price. My entire methodology is built around price. No doubt, there are many successful traders that have methodologies built around volume. There are other threads that are well suited for a discussion of volume, but this thread is not one of them.
Scenario 1:
Price comes down to a line and then "bounces off" that line.
We call that line support.
That line maybe was created by an indicator. Perhaps a pivot. Perhaps a fibonacci retracement. Perhaps an extension. A trend line. All kinds of things.
Now, Scenario 2:
Price comes down to a line and then "bounces off" that line.
We call that line support.
This time, the line was created by a random number generator. Our mind automatically says hmm, that line really has no weight -- no significance. Yet, here I am "seeing" (visualizing) the same type of behavior that my other indicators give me.
In reality, if you continue searching you'll find a dozen reasons for why price may have done what it did that have absolutely nothing to do with the random number (clearly), or anything to do with the fib retracement, pivot, MACD, CCI, whatever. Look long enough and you'll find something.
To me, I am just opening my mind up to accept the possibility that these other tools are not as important as I once thought they were.
