Quote:
|
I guess I'm afraid that the market will move so fast that I won't be able to go to the bathroom...and what if my internet connection goes down?
|
Laptop + wifi == trading in the bathroom.
For very cheap, you can get a second internet service. It doesn't have to be very fast (even go for dialup if you want)... it just needs to work when your main connection fails. I definitely suggest this for professional traders. Or, at the very least, be sure you know how to call your broker to get your positions closed out.
Quote:
|
Traderwill, could you tell me please why conventional technical analysis doesn't work anymore?
|
Well, I'm not Traderwill, but I'll say: technical analysis still works, but anytime some idea with a big edge is outlined in a book, it disappears in the actual markets. This is because buying and selling changes the course of the price action. Say the strategy says "buy when X happens". Well, first, a huge number of people will start buying at X, which causes an exaggerated jump in the price, and makes it hard to get in on the action. Then, people wise up and start buying just before X. Then everyone does that. Then people buy just before that, and on and on until the edge disappears.
Quote:
|
Or maybe I misunderstood...are you saying that I need to pick the technical indicators that I personally want to track rather than using someone else's system? I could do that...I never did understand what a japanese candlestick was in the first place, but moving averages are nothing short of poetic.
|
You're just going to have to start forming ideas, and trying them out to see what works for you. Published systems are a great way to get ideas of what kinds of things worked in the past. In the circles I run in, most technical indicators have fallen out of fashion. We mainly watch price action, and keep some moving average up to see the overall direction.
An important thing to understand is that technical indicators don't actually add any information to a chart... they are actually filtering the data. They highlight some aspects of the price and volume action, while hiding others. So, you can see everything that the indicators tell you on a bare chart, if you know how to look. That's not to say they're useless, but it should make it clear that they aren't holy grails.
And now for the shameless plug portion of the post: there are articles on all these topics on my blog.