Go check out The Imitation Game on Netflix if you haven’t seen it yet. It has many analogies to trading that I think will resonate with you.
Good trading is about being able to distinguish signals from noise. In the short term, everything is noise though – even potential signals.
When you don’t have a plan, everything looks appealing. Any big move that you’re not in gives you the emotional feedback that you’ve missed the move and that you should have.
The Enigma code breakers had great motivation to crack the code: save English lives and end the war. Our motivation is to limit risk and be in high expected value trades.
You can use price as your main signal, but admittedly, in the short run, it looks like noise. It’s not until you look back to see the statistical significance of today’s closing price to the past that you can begin to ascertain whether it’s signal or noise.
Your trading system is what you can rely on to decipher the data and create trading signals that you can rely on. Without a system, much of what you see can be construed as disinformation – even the price. This is especially true for short-term, intraday traders.
This is why I think you’re in for a life of frustration if you’re trying to day trade: all the intraday data are random. If you’re lucky enough that today’s intraday data is aligned with significant weekly or monthly time frames, you might have a good trade. If that’s the case, keep the trade though and let the momentum follow through overnight and over the weekend. That is the only way you can fight the manipulation that you’ll otherwise suffer from the hands of the HFTs and their criminal counterparts – the exchanges.
Keep in mind that most indicators only confirm what you already know the price is telling you. You can probably simplify your trading by removing all the overlays and indicators from your charts.
Compare your daily data with weekly and monthly data levels to confirm your signals, not trading indicators, overlays, or lines that you feel compelled to draw on your charts. If you find yourself needing to do that emotionally, you’re grasping for something that’s not there.
You can also test your models and from the ones that I’ve done, the tests that I’ve run without the technical indicators versus the ones that included them, the results weren’t improved by having the indicators included.
I wrote in The Inner Voice of Trading that I felt (and still do) that they are for the most part “emotional band aids.” Indicators won’t help you “not” feel the feelings that are trying to teach you something. They will also add another layer of frustration to the mix and I’ve yet to see one that is foolproof.
The best thing you can do is simulate your trading ideas over 10 to 20 years of data to see if they have any “rich” history. I’ve never met a daytrader who can tell me the the expected value of a trade he’s made nor that of his favorite pattern.
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