Old timers - and young - who are willing to learn are a joy to behold. To be significantly more senior though I must warn you, you have to have been born before 1941. My degree was far more easily acquired since I am only a humble engineer but engineers love few things more than a chunky problem and the stock market qualified. After several years of keeping charts manually it seemed to me that projecting future prices, let alone times and prices, was a futile exercise.
It seemed to me that no individual or method had produced results consistently good enough to satisfy so I looked for another approach that was both unique and logically promising. Unlike some commentators, I accepted that the market expresses itself most eloquently at the coal-face where buy/sell orders get placed.
There we see the cutting edge of not just someone's information and opinion but ALL information and opinion. That is why fundamental analysis is inferior - it uses inferior sources, fewer of them and is immediately out of date to some greater or lesser degree. Does anybody believe your competition waits around for you to read the research and act upon it? What if some surprise fundamental comes along after the report material has been gathered? I have seen at close quarters more than enough fundamental analysts.
In March 1980 I concluded that volume and price and time were all irrelevant at certain times of disaster or crisis, and therefore possessed undesirable attributes that disqualified them from being critical elements of any universally reliable technical analysis system. They are of course significant, but not critical. What is both critical and universal is sentiment, so how to calculate it? That has to be my secret but it is out there available to all who make the effort. Before prices can change, sentiment must. Sentiment at one minute can be compared to sentiment at all other minutes. If it is breaking trend and/or not confirming, you are about to experience a turn. For that reason, I prefer to call myself a turning point analyst but I also use a very limited number of indicators and generally accepted principles.
My career was given quite a boost when not only was I lucky enough to define several months in advance, the time and price window for the 1987 high but I got lucky again and called the crash low about an hour before it occurred. Something very similar occurred in 2007 for the high and I was lucky enough to call the low which occurred in March 2009, only once, but that time the call was a bit late, in the afternoon when it should have been in the morning.
These calls are just four of many but they give you an idea of what is possible. The luck is continuing in trading our favourite stock.
Rest assured, NST investors and traders, there will be a time for that final sell - stock history informs us that NST will one day disappear. I'll be heartbroken if it predeceases me but if it does start down from its final high, and I am still alive, history suggests I will have sold. Wishful thinking has no place in our consciousness and every high can be the final high; nobody, but nobody, knows.
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