And greetings to you Howard... I'll get rid of all the baggage of the various previous posts on the old thread and only focus on one tiny statement you made that seems to do a very good job of summarizing the gist of the subject:
"My position is that any system that recognizes an inefficiency, and trades it profitably, removes some of that inefficiency." Technical traders are all about identifying and exploiting repetitive inefficiencies in the market. Most inefficiencies are short in duration and therefore not repetitive enough to catch with backtested trading systems before they vanish. But then some patterns (inefficiencies) persist long enough to exploit for some period of time (which produces better results than flipping a coin). While (for the most part) I managed to avoid the "Great Recession" of the past year, I finally had to accept the fact that taking outright positions in individual stocks had become too risky for my disposiiton because of the chicanery, hype, mis-direction and outright dishonesty of Corporate Leaders, Analysts, Talking Heads, Money Managers, etc. Perhaps Brian's repeated references to "Coin Flips" struck an unwelcome nerve because of my recent reincarnation into a complete skeptic of free market management teams and the information they dis-siminate to an unsuspecting public. This does not mean that I do not trade however. I've switched to trading Options on the underlying, using various spread strategies to mitigate as much of the risk as possible associated with adverse price moves. I can use AB to find lists of candidates for manually exploring Options strategies, but I no longer search for strategies which take outright positions in the equities. By putting together multi-leg Options positions I can structure some pretty nice trades that have good pay-off's (when they work) and with positions that act much like shock absorbers when the crap hits the fan on the underlying. That does not mean that I don't take losses when necessary... It just means that my losses no longer have a linear relationship to adverse moves in the underlying. And finally back to your point about finding "inefficiencies", I have found that the Options Market Makers have their fair share of mis-pricing and inefficiencies which I've been able to occasionally derive profits from. But I am way off topic. Good Luck.
