Any room on this forum for a thread on charts and technical analysis

[Vae Victis]

For posterity, I closed all of my open positions this morning at a small profit, so I am back to 100% cash in that account.

[Vae Victis]

Do you feel comfortable even giving a percentage of what this is compared to your total investments? Is this 5%, 15%, 50%, 75%, etc. of your total investments? Also, it would help if you gave how much you are buying, even if that is just a percentage of your taxable account.

About 50% but that number is growing as my taxable account grows (and my others shrink during this correction).

[The White Coat Investor]

My purpose for starting this thread was to discuss chart setups and technical analysis with other docs, not to submit my trading account for audit. I haven't found like-minded docs in real life so I thought it worth a try. It never occurred to me that I would need to report position sizing, etc in order to make these posts interesting or useful. I have posted charts of the trades I have entered FWIW.

At any rate, given the lack of activity in this thread, it seems that there isn't much interest anyway. I will stop posting to it.

What does a chart mean without any sort of documented thread behind it showing it works? You might as well take a picture of your tea leaves and then say "bought Amazon today based on a support level suggested by these two overlapping leaves."

It really doesn't matter what the chart looks like until you can show us that you are using it to profitably predict future returns.

[Vae Victis]

What does a chart mean without any sort of documented thread behind it showing it works? You might as well take a picture of your tea leaves and then say "bought Amazon today based on a support level suggested by these two overlapping leaves."

It really doesn't matter what the chart looks like until you can show us that you are using it to profitably predict future returns.

It was not my purpose to publish a trading diary; I understand that that is something that you and others are asking for, but I am not going to provide. My purpose was to discuss trade setups and strategies with other active traders. A few others have chimed in with their trading strategies, which is great, but they are few and far between.

I think we can both agree that this thread is not serving our purposes. Feel free to close.

[Tim]

It was not my purpose to publish a trading diary; I understand that that is something that you and others are asking for, but I am not going to provide. My purpose was to discuss trade setups and strategies with other active traders. A few others have chimed in with their trading strategies, which is great, but they are few and far between.

I think we can both agree that this thread is not serving our purposes. Feel free to close.

There is room for discussion. What I haven’t seen is any specifics of your trading methods.
What are the data points that you screen for?
What combination is a “good setup “?
Head and shoulders, moving averages (anything from 10 to 200). Posting a picture is beauty in the eyes of the beholder. Why was it so beautiful? Form, texture, composition, colors, style, fine details?
The reasons why you made a trade, the stops and exit. Why did you go to all cash?
Some use advance/Devine for market depth.
If I look at a chart of SPX the time period is so critical to how I “feel”. 50 years or 5 years flips my feel. 5 years I am optimistic, 50 years I feel the bottom is going to dropout. Why is the chart attractive needs to be explained. That would be a discussion. Not a criticism, a suggestion only for meaningful exchange.
Event , plus moving average, plus positive market breadth might trigger a buy. The absence of one of the indicators means stay in cash or a smaller sizing with a tighter stop. The reason is the stock might go against the total market or be sucked down . Technical trading is data driven. I don’t have a clue of your data points for a buy or sell or what is a good setup.

[The White Coat Investor]

I think this thread has been very effective at demonstrating why trading and why using the vast majority of what people call technical analysis is so foolhardy. I can teach hundreds of thousands of people an effective investing technique using a single page of paper. But someone trading on TA may not be able to teach an effective investing technique to anyone at all even with an unlimited amount of time. Investing based on feelings and trying to imagine patterns in the data is a great way to underperform long-term, especially after costs, taxes and the value of one's time. I'm not surprised you are having trouble finding a lot of people doing it when you look for them in a group of relatively sensible investors.

[Vae Victis]

I think this thread has been very effective at demonstrating why trading and why using the vast majority of what people call technical analysis is so foolhardy. I can teach hundreds of thousands of people an effective investing technique using a single page of paper. But someone trading on TA may not be able to teach an effective investing technique to anyone at all even with an unlimited amount of time. Investing based on feelings and trying to imagine patterns in the data is a great way to underperform long-term, especially after costs, taxes and the value of one's time. I'm not surprised you are having trouble finding a lot of people doing it when you look for them in a group of relatively sensible investors.

Cool.