Excellent Post, Also, thanks for the kind words Joe, but " To cut a long story short Wombat has mentioned many times surviving boom to busts"...more precisely I said lived through them, up close and personal, but didn't necessarily survive, especially after making a lot of money in late 90's thru early 2000. I did have excellent stocks, but they went too far too fast (EMC, CSCO, NTAP, JDSU the "next Intel" - Gilder..he was right..until it all crashed) other telecom equipment makers in Internet infrastructure (Wave Division Multiplexing )...make the bullets and sell them to Lucent, Nortel, Siemens, Alcatel etc......you can't lose...even Corning (GLW) was suddenly sexy...they should NOT have been 10 baggers in a year, QCOM should NOT have gone up 2,614% in 12 months. These were signals which I didn't listen to.
Even when the wife's sister asked what stocks I held! The mother (sister in law??) of all exit signals! Like Joe Kennedy's shoeshine boy giving him stock tips...time to get out of markets....
As I said I had good stocks, industry leaders,....but also confused brains with a bull mkt...it didn't matter what you held, they all went up, the only difference was by how much. Yesterday's QCOM is today's IOT, XPE on ASX etc... But QCOM was real..it invented CDMA, and made a lot of money off IP. JDSU made the fiber optic components to the above telco equipment manufacturers and was doing $50B deals almost monthly...stock split after split after split....After the crash....the worst performing stock for the next five years.
Still, it was an epic mania (biggest bull in US history), and I didn't know when to sell, as you said, the hardest part. Paper profits up in smoke. Biggest mistake of my life. Had I known what I was doing, I'd have had total financial freedom forever since 2001.
I moved to trading CME Futures (currencies, long gold, shorting stock indexes etc..) but without knowing Shiite about the shark infested waters in which I was swimming.
I left markets for a long time, bloodied and battered.
I'm pleased you've made the effort to study the machinations and manipulations of those markets, and trying to pass on what you've learnt to others, including myself...it's a steep learning curve, and goes against the conventional wisdom , as I said above.
Re the indicators etc...thousands of texts, from A to Z (book of same name by Steve Achelis, indeed ASX Website Charting Indicators "Help" quotes directly from that book). Everybody uses them, MACD, Stochastic, CCI, DMI, Aroon, Chaikin Money Flow etc....to Zig Zag
While people can interpret them differently, and as they say reading charts is as much art as science, if everybody is looking at basically the same charts and "automated" indicators with their crossover "signals" and divergences why do 90% fail? Especially, in more predatory markets such as Futures (Currencies, Commodities etc, which is where the pros play...certainly not in stocks )?
Back on topic , since I started this "chart thread" gold does seem to have failed support, and appears to be breaking down....not happy.
But as Aussies like to say, it is what it is.
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