Yesterday I got this e-mail:
Hello Richard, It has been enjoyable watching you evolve in your study of the markets. From a slightly cocky and arrogant ( which is sometimes necessary to have ) to this sweet guy that wants to dance with the market. Remember the old etrade commercial? Anyways you seem to have a very good mathematical and creative mind. My question is what is your experience and knowledge with matrix theory, combinatorics and graph theory? There is a much more arsonal of tools than what the heard mentality uses. Where did you go to school and what is your studies/degree. Appreciate the feedback and be cool… sincerely, (name removed)
… then today, I get this from the same person:
to richard: It does not suprise me that you do not reply to my email? Move the markets??? what a joke! It should be move WITH the market dot com. There is no place for EGO in the market!!! When you are wrong you must admit it. And we are all wrong at times… human nature. You are fooling yourself with your indicators.. INDICATORS ARE A JOKE! The truth is YOU CANNOT TRADE BIG LOTS.. you are not GENETICALLY WIRED FOR IT. There is an electrical impulse that is triggered off and you will never get over the FEAR of LOSING MONEY… good luck, (name removed)
Dude… give me at least a couple days to respond before you go all postal. I’m sure your mother told you how special you were before helping you climb into the padded short bus every morning, but I get a large mix of fanmail and hatemail every day. Just not usually from the same person! Sometimes, especially around US holidays, I get a backlog that I have to work through later.
Anyway, I have a party to go to… I just couldn’t resist posting this little bit of website-owner joy. Keep that in mind if you ever want to start a website: it brings out all kinds of people.
“YOU CANNOT TRADE BIG LOTS.. you are not GENETICALLY WIRED FOR IT.”
Holy shit, I am still laughing.
Richard,
Thanks for that… I return to this article every time I need a head shake and a smile during the day…
hee…hee….have a great 4th of July week end!
The personal stuff aside, EOT is on one side of a continuum when it comes to trading price patterns vs trading indicators.
Interestingly, you’ve recently had some quotes by Al Brooks…who is decidedly against indicators. I am reading his book this weekend. Haven’t gotten too far into it yet but I do like his writing style.
I dunno, I know that is the perception because we offer like 50 indicators or whatever. When I first got into indicator writing I went overboard in my personal trading, but most of what I talk about in late 2008 to present are charts with 2 to 3 indicators, and people that have spent time with me know that I’ve always kept my eye on candlestick patterns (a hold-over from my stock trading). We offer a large toolbox so that hopefully people can find what they need for whatever trading ideas they have.
I love the Al Brooks book. On the whole I think it’s the best price action material I’ve read. I’m maybe 2/3rds of the way through it now. Some of his ideas about the ‘whys’ behind the patterns are at odds with mine, which has made me think.
I’m slogging through the book and truly enjoying it and learning a lot. It is very dense reading for me, but worthwhile. Before I could move through the book very easily, I located two one-hour audio/video presentations he did for Futures Magazine, and a couple of articles. Hearing him point things out on the charts is ver helpful for me. Also, an interesting interview for the Christian Financial Network.
He does love explaining all the patterns away, and I wonder. It’s kind of hand-to-hand combat for him out there sometimes, but thinking in images may be helpful.
Here’s a link to the radio show. If you’re interested, I can find links to the other stuff.
link
Wow. On the bright side, this idiot/asshole is on the other side of our trades and I will be happy to take his money while he is throwing another titty tantrum.
Usually when people are as “enlightened” as this guy would claim to be, they do not act like this. So he is either mental, or a joke.
Either way, I got a good laugh.
You can be “for indicators”, against them, whatever. You can be anything you want to be and you should use whatever works for you. Al Brooks talks about what works for him, Richard talks about what works for him, and I talk about what works for me. Unlike the nut job Richard blogged about, we’re trying to help fellow traders and that is what is important.
Happy 4th!
Mike
calling someone an idiot/asshole.. now who is throwing a tantrum? happy to take his money? you skew/tilt the odds in your favor and “take money out of the machine :-) It is the institutions and hedge funds and the market in general that you must find a tactic and strategy of exploiting weakness… what do you know about combinatorial gamne theory? Is a graph unlike a chess board or chinese game go? Did I ever once call someone a derogatory name or did I talk about trading,increasing bet size, risk and genetics. Also electrical impulses as in endorphine release and the fear when accepting and containing the volatility in relation to the price and time frames in doing so.. it seems as though you all are in TILT and until you intelligently anwer these questions you will remain so :-)
First off, I deleted the comment you made where you said your name was Zoomie. Not very classy of you to impersonate another commentor.
Secondly, I can’t take you seriously because you throw around terms like combinatorics and matrix theory without seeming to know what they mean. The real mathematical exercise is in characterizing a trading situation in such a way that some part of established matrix theory (for example) applies in some useful way. A claim that I am on tilt until I discuss matrix theory or game theory is nonsensical. Between that, your mood swings, and the fact that half of your sentences meander at length without completing a thought, I don’t think we’ll have a very good conversation. You should probably just move on, because even in the case that you are so much smarter than I am that I just can’t follow your brilliance, we still can’t have a useful exchange. Good trading to you.
awesome, simply awesome Richard. Thank you for the late night smiles and good discourse. I once did a work exchange with a doctor of Tibetan Medicine, where I transcribed documents for him, and in return he was kind enough to share some of his wisdom with me. He shared a very ancient teaching in Tibetan medicine that I find helps me open my heart to the myriad of confusion we humans find ourselves in: according to Tibetan medical theory, simply incarnating as a human being is a form of illness, in the sense that it takes a certain amount of grasping/hope/fear for this to occur in most cases…furthermore according to Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, it is the habit of ever oscillating between hopeful grasping and fearful aversion that keeps us appearing to be born into this human realm with it’s beauty and it’s terror. I guess it’s no coincidence that us Humans came up with these markets driven by hope and fear. And, here we are online seeking to communicate with our peers (fellow students) and those with greater skill/experience (mentors & masters) so that we may learn to be in harmony with the market and benefit through this harmony…in a holographic sense, very similar to people seeking spiritual teachings/practices in order to return their own awareness to some harmony & illumination, benefit from this harmony, and share this benefit with others. It’s funny how when someone is gripped by a form of fanaticism and they begin shooting (literally and figuratively) their ideas about, if you think about it, many times, their intent is to actual “benefit” you, while their actions most of the time sort of “miss this mark”. What I find so fascinating though is distilling away all the verbage, reasoning, past psychological/physical trauma, developemental gaps, & what-have-you, and often what you have is this misguided but kind of pure intent to want to be helpful. Anyway, I am definitely a rambler on this July 5th 1:17am shift, late night stream of consciousness and too much watching Steve Nison seminars talking about how “the Japanese have a saying…” :-). Thanks so much Richard for being such a great guy who shares from the heart. As a relatively new student to the markets, I really, really, really appreciate your perspective and general attitude towards the markets/life. Before I found the Eotpro blog videos and your blog, I thought studying the markets was not going to be fun. Thanks for showing me the fun side. Best of wishes to you & all your relations. -May all beings be happy, B
The dude that sent you those e-mails is clearly disturbed. The fact that he challenges you to a discussion about mathematics reveals that he probably resents your for your success. He doesn’t seem fully coherent, and demonstrates a lack of knowledge about the topics he addresses (combinatorial game theory? oh please), I can’t imagine who these people are that go online only to insult others and ramble on and on about nothing. Whoever this guy is, he must lead a sad, depressing little life and I honestly feel bad for him.
Combinatorial Game Theory is based on you move I move games. As the above author of this site stated “Indicators are a Suckers Game” so now where does that leave us? I would also conclude that buying “single lot” trades in a market where the volatility is unknown is also a fool’s game ( especially when the expectation is in a short time frame ) One must ask if I cannot control the market as in volatility can I contain it? A wild fire can be contained only if one widens the space outside the current and works his way in. So this brings us to the 1/2 1/3 which is a “combination” trade spaced at different price points ( or levels ). If one can divide his position in thirds and space them into $10 increments on say the s&p 500 how does this change or adjust the probabilities or variables? Just a small sample of the world of “combinatorics”. And if you think this is an idiot/asshole post think again :-)
Combinatorial Game Theory applies to 2-person games of perfect information. Even if you call all the other participants “the other player” and ignore the fact that you have no information about anything except the tape, I don’t see how you get past the fact that you only have (at best) a probabilistic model of how your moves affect the state of the game. No combinatorial game theory I’ve seen deals with probabilistic models or games involving chance…. and I hate to break it to you, but a scaled “combination” entry is not an example of “combinatorics.” That would be like saying I’m applying combinatorics if I cut my steak into bite-sized chunks. So once again I say you seem to be tossing around terms without knowing what they mean.
You completely missed the point of my statement about indicators. Why the hell would I denounce indicators when I make, use, and sell them? What I said was, starting with a bunch of indicators and trying to form a trading plan from them was a game for suckers. You should start from a trading idea, and then use indicators as tools to bring out the ideas you are trying to trade.
It’s been fun, but again I’m going to ask you to please move on. I’m going to close comments on this post now, so that hopefully we can all just move on.