I am not in the market to catch the biggest moves or to be Nostradamus. I am in the market to make money, and if the way in which I’ve been trading the last few months—which has proven to give me a streak of consistency—is the way I do that then so be it. I am going to miss moves, particularly moves that I may have easily anticipated. My days are a success if I’m green and if I took reasonable trades to facilitate the goal of consistency.
Also, what was well done today, in the ITU chat, TLM made a prediction that SPX would touch 3820 today & made it with significant conviction, attaching some weird Fibonacci curve chart bullshit. A few days ago, he predicted beautifully the extent of the drop on the day after the CPI earnings & he is, I believe, a very successful, knowledgeable, experienced trader. However, All this said, I took his conviction with a grain of salt, remembering all the times he’s been wrong before, and though my trading today was absolutely spurred by the level of his conviction, I acted according to my own barometer & market/price action sense, & while I took trades that were not necessarily quality, I did so in a way that was overly cautious & listened to the price action of the market, not the conviction of another trader, to determine my execution. As it turns out, he was dead wrong in his prediction—the market didn’t come close to his level & in fact, rebounded to close with considerable strength. Not only this, but it bounced off my daily levels to a T, rather than whatever fuck shot of a level he’d made up with his curves.
The crude long & short of it: This scumbag romps around like he’s a god, but he’s just another asshole in the market and doesn’t know any better than anyone else. I am grateful to myself for having had the wherewithal to consider his opinion but not act directly on it, and to realize he’s just another dickhead in the market, just like me. I know enough now to navigate and am only becoming more knowledgeable, and soon I will be as knowledgeable as anyone else participating in the market, and likely more so given my often inconvenient desire to understand a largely irrelevant bigger picture , and I will still, even at this point, just be another dick head in the market. All the faux sophistication and pretentiousness is a façade—the suits, degrees, and pompousness evaporate before the void of the market, and I need not be intimated by such false liveries cast as necessities to navigate, I need only be intimidated by the void itself.
Stick to the source materials. Learn for yourself and trust only those who are executers with a track record that you can see. Stick to the source of the economic data, ground yourself in the knowledge of what it is and follow the threads of truth to whatever ends they take you. You can only rely on yourself, and you are now in an arena where that self reliance is a powerful asset. You will and must trade according to your own temperament and arm yourself with knowledge to the extent that you’re able. You must get to a place where no one knows better than you because no one can know better than you. No one knows the market, and no one knows your style in the market.