MightyMouse

It is funny to hear both, especially when it is from the same person, but I suppose your associate is right about the inflation adjusted price of gold. The comment about the inflation hedge is that it is the commonly used hedge against inflation. Gold and other precious metals are seen as being good stores of value. Inflation erodes value in intangible assets. Gold is a good store of value, but by no means is it a great or perfect store of value and, therefore not a perfect hedge against inflation.

Rande, Is this possible or practical? If someone's mind isn't currently suited for trading wouldn't it make more sense to find a suitable vocation or talent for that person's mind rather than go through all the trouble to learn TA then get to work on developing his mind to be able to properly observe the markets so that it is more suited for trading? Besides which TA and the proper mind will likely get a trader to be a breakeven trader but no more than that. Traders have or develop a knack for finding other traders to buy inventory from them at high prices or sell to them at low prices. They know how to find those traders that are pressured to buy or sell at the wrong times. TA or traditional TA will will not get you there. BTW, I am not questioning whether or not you can help someone develop their mind. MM

What does the following mean: 1) a smattering of 'technicals' are starting to show some persistence that a good ‘rally’ has some potential…(albeit feasibly from much lower levels ) It reads like you are saying the market has some rally potential but it might be from lower levels which sounds like it could go up but it could go down. That info doesn't help much.

Hell Yes! That is the worst. You're right you're wrong you're right you're wrong...

It is relative. I want immediate gratification.

Markets that move too slowly.

The guy should never have gotten married. He will be the wrong guy no matter what.

Central Banks wish your hyper-inflationary theory is correct. In fact that is what they are trying to do because they fear that they cannot prevent asset prices from falling. When all the gold bugs realize that the opposite of what they were expecting is occurring, we will see gold at $12 an ounce.

I just forwarded this to my wife.

I am having a fortunate year with both long and short term trades. Not so fortunate on my choice of brokers. My last losing year was 2008. Before that I lost in 2003. I take note of my losing days, weeks or months, but it is just noise. I do not do this to survive, but i wouldn't do it if I couldn't win.

I disagree. Price is just another indicator and is the mechanism most used to lure traders into taking the wrong trades. Price is one of the easiest components on a chart to manipulate. When they think price is low enough, it is price traders are looking at. When they think price is high enough, again, it is price they are looking at. Smoothed price can prevent the trader from taking that bait. It is possible that traders push prices to a particular level, seeking liquidity, or exhausting demand. Correct me if I am wrong, but I think it is not possible that traders push prices up simply to make price cross, say, a 50sma. Price is constantly leading traders in the wrong direction. In any trend price spends a great amount of time going the wrong way. Price's misdirection during a trend is what I believe makes it difficult to stay in a trend. As a practical example, consider Crude since late March to today's close. It is down +- $20 a barrel. How many active traders were able to capture the equivalent on a per contract basis? To put that into dollars and cents that is $20,000 per contract traded in 3 months. Following along with the daily action, it most likely constantly felt like the move was ending, making unsuspecting traders liquidate their perfectly good positions. On the other hand, had you traded using a very simple MA indicator, you could have captured the bulk of the 2000 tick move. Did the price action trader capture 2000 or more ticks during this time period? I think price can be as distracting as any other indicator that we put on a chart.

Are you going to share what the system is based on or do you only intend to use members feedback for your benefit?

God Josh. Please, anything but the girl analogy. Some of us come here to escape.

Right or wrong I give you a lot of credit for showing what you would do before the fact. It takes a certain level of humility that most guys on these threads do not have. What works? I stick to following the direction and expecting that direction to continue. The euro is and has been screaming long term short to me. I have been short, have added to my short, and will add again to my short when and if we get below the 1.1875 area and plan to accelerate the adds thereafter. If we begin to get a series of higher highs and higher lows, I'll exit or get stopped out BE. I would hate to miss out on something that is occurring right under my nose.

If struggling means losing, then the first thing you need to do is get to be a break even trader. To get to be a break even trader you need to first identify the market you are in to know which entry strategy you want to apply. So, is the market ranging or is it trending or is it doing both? if it is ranging then you want to take trades at support or resistance. There are a multitude of entry set ups for this type of market on these threads. If it is trending, then you likely want to enter with some sort of pull back set up. A fib pullback or something like. If it is doing both, then you want a simple breakout set up to enter. Perhaps, a 1-2-3 set up. Print out charts and circle and draw the trends, ranges, etc. and Identify what you should have done and when you should have done it. The goal is to learn how to take these trades and execute the trade perfectly. Perfect execution means that you sit there and let it either hit your target or your stop and fight off all temptations to take additional actions. It also means that you do not chase an entry, do not modify your criteria for entry or exit because of a missed trade or a loss, etc. Most people can't do this. If you learn to do this then you'll have an edge over most traders. You might make money or lose money instead of breaking even. The money at this moment isn't important. The important thing to do is to move from being a struggling trader and the first step is to learn how to execute without fail even if it means losing money. A fact that most "struggling traders" do not learn is that you have to lose money sometimes. A good strategy can and will lose money. Sometimes it is for days, or weeks or longer depending on what the strategy is. Just because it lost money, it does not mean that you need to change it or tweak it. What can occur is that the strategist, is applying the wrong strategy to the wrong market conditions (range, trend or breakout).. The strategy doesn't need to me "tweaked", it needs to be changed to a different strategy that suits the market conditions. But, if you got the conditions right, and you lose money, it does not mean that something is wrong even though your mind will think something is wrong. You need to learn this first so that you will have the will to execute the next trade even though the last one or couple failed. The above will absolutely get you to breakeven over time and is a first step. Identifying conditions and execution.

Oil dropping to the $50 area will provide relief to the economy; however, I wouldn't call it stimulus. $50 oil from these levels would probably equate to $1200 to $2000 per household (just a guess) in the USA, but it is not going to stimulate job growth. High oil prices are mostly passed onto the consumer, so they pay when it increases and benefit when it decreases. Will corporations attempt to grow and expand with the knowledge that oil has provided economic relief to consumers? It probably wouldn't happen right away, but if corporations got used to the fact that oil was going to remain at the $50 level, then perhaps they would build it into the equation and eventually the relief would equate to additional stimulus. Oil is a commodity and like all other commodities, when prices are high, more supply is brought to market. I agree that we will see $50 oil or maybe less, provided Ahmadinejad is a good boy and doesn't force us to solidify a second term for our incumbent chief in November. Sure, there is the potential of increased demand and the threat of "peak oil" but both of those issues are factors to impact us in the next few decades and not good reasons to have oil at $100+ today.

A "Black Swan" is an event that is thought to not have a chance of occurring or its chance of occurring is so remote that it is discounted. It is, therefore, not accounted for in the pricing of a market. I don't see how trading in only one direction all the time is helpful. If instead you say only trade in the direction of trend, I'll be willing to buy it.

DB, "The Wychoff Method" as I learned it was a stock selection system. A very similar system is presented by VectorVest. I used vectorvest first, and then learned of Wychoff and figured that the creator of vectorvest adpated his system from Wychokk. In a nutshell, as I recall it, it is a tops down approach to selecting stocks where you begin by determining market direction, then finding the strongest moving industries (or sectors) and then selecting the best stocks, given technical and fundamental analysis. So, when Wychoff is referenced, are we referencing a bastardized version of Wychoff or is there another version of Wychoff that I am unfamiliar with that does not lead to the selection of stocks?

Way too much regulation.

Stops are almost never like your metaphors. There really isn't the same risk in the market that a net, air bag, or parachute protects you from. Nothing in the market will kill you. In the end it is just money. Stops are more like a small (hopefully) insurance policy that you buy so you won't lose a lot of money if you are wrong. Most stops end up being frustrating and a waste of money which is why so many people try to trade without them. I use them no matter what, simply because I see loses as a cost and any business is going to have costs and as long as I have enough revenue to overcome the costs, I will be just fine. Good luck with the dad thing

I do not know if traders fail because of their indicators. I have my suspicions why they fail and it has a lot to do with items and issues not found on a chart.

Sorry for using the wrong qualifier. I said all, you said most. Which, then, are worthless. I am sure that information will be useful to the community.

You are certainly entitled to your opinions. But, if you are going to use verbiage like "extensive study" and conclude that all old indicators are worthless when, on any given day, we can observe an indicator performing exactly as it was intended to perform, then I would suggest that your analysis is severely flawed or intentionally flawed to suit your purpose which I suggest is to play on the emotions of the gullible and vulnerable trader and present your indicators.

Ha ha. You are a good egg. I believe that there are lots of people looking for him. It's all part of the experience.

I like MMS's decision process. He seems to be a good deliberator. I think we should support MMS to run for president of the United States because he would be good at taking everyone's view and making decisions that would benefit all of us. I certainly think that he would do a much better job at making those decisions that our current president. Unfortunately, there isn't time enough to get MMS positioned for the 2012 elections. He won't admit that he enjoyed this brief ego boost. It's also unfortunate that MMS will make a decision to delete this irrelevant, off topic post when he reads this sentence.