FIB, RSI, MACD, AND BREAKOUT PATTERNS ARE TRASH! (MUST WATCH!)

13 avr. 2019

I'm aware the title has offended you. Read through this post anyway, I'm sure I touch up on your complaints.

Stop forming your identity around your strategy. Even I am not immune to this. it’s all too common to form a personal relationship with the tools you’re using to trade. Whether that’s the indicators on your chart, your Gann shooting star wave pattern Fibonacci double top, or your boutique breakout patterns. It doesn’t matter how bland, innovative, common it is or if it’s the “golden standard” everyone worships and trusts. I’m happy that you like it and found something you identify with. It should be nice and comfy for you to settle into that confirmation bias, “Mm, yes it is indeed a double top” as you scroll through the fifth page of the Tradingview ideas section, pinpointing the chart that agrees with you.

There’s a better way to do things. I don’t care what you’re using, maybe, just maybe, there’s a way to improve your strategy. I can confirm this idea is seen as wildly offensive. Ask someone why their strategy works and they’ll cringe like you just asked them if their spouse is cheating. “How dare you question their effectiveness! I’ll let you know we have a long history together and I love them very much.” I’m sure you do, but have you noticed some of the warning signs? They’re all right there in front of you. It may not feel good when I ask, but if the signs are there and 3/4ths of marriages fail, it wouldn’t sit well with me if I didn’t speak up just to keep you comfy cozy.

Analogies aside, your “spouse” is your strategy. The warning sign is that you keep on losing trades, blaming your loses on “volatility” without wanting to admit what the real problem is. Perhaps you’re still green for now, just wait for a larger sample size of a trade history. Much like your imaginary marriage, the odds are wildly against you. Why do you think 95 plus percent of traders fail? You can massage data however you like, the problem is at some point you decided to stop improving because you got confident.

If you met a tribe in the wilderness who planted fish in their fields as “an offering to their gods” in order to grow bigger crops, what do you do? Do you keep quiet about their ways? Sure, their crops WILL grow larger because of this tradition, but not for the reasons they believe. Would providing them industrial fertilizer and a crop rotation plan improve their crop output? Absolutely, but that would require that they admit they’re wrong and would be contrary to their identity. You’d get the response “but it’s worked for us so far! What we’re using is a proven standard.” Their blind faith in their dogma would prevent them from seeing that maybe, just maybe their is a better way to do things. If you don’t know why something works, you need to be skeptical regardless of how effective it is. Don’t be satisfied with mediocrity, comfort and undeserved confidence will only get you so far. There will always be someone with more experience, money, knowledge, and connections than you. You’ve brought a knife to a gun fight and have decided not to pick up the gun because you got some lucky stabs in. What’s worse is this even isn’t a gunfight, it’s thermonuclear war between institutional investors.

If you're a middle school basketball star, do you cry when you skin your knees after getting fouled when you chose to play street ball in downtown Detroit? No, because you should have known what you were getting into, and if you do cry, all the street ballers will tear you to shreds. If you don't want to play street ball and learn to play like everyone else does, go back to your middle school basketball court. If you can't understand why you keep getting hurt trading crypto and are unwilling to adopt the winning fighting style, go back to trading securities. Winners don't need to play by the rules of "golden standard" of TA. 

What if the "golden standard" is only so because they're tools that make you predictable for people who know better? If you have the masses all trading the same information, that makes for predictable moves. 

Predictable traders make for a predictable market. A predictable market makes for a profitable market. The only reason you've been given the "golden standard" is to provide liquidity for those with more buying power, resources, knowledge, experience and connections than you.

Specifically concerning the crypto market, there are additional flaws.


"There’s a general point here to make about standard oscillators like RSI: the numbers used for them basically assume conventional markets and typical oscillating ranges.
They were not designed to describe dramatically trending coins.
In such trends, they tend to go deep into “oversold”/“overbought” territory and persist. You may get several divergences before the one that actually reverses after exhaustion.
I wouldn’t call it useless so much as having far lower predictive power than advertised.
It’s also something so widely used that you can virtually guaranteed not to have an edge from that information." -acatwithcharts

If you ARE interested in a better way to do things, I am inclined to think my findings aren't half bad. Click through the links below and in my signature to learn more about how I do things differently.