Honestly, I know you mean well. I tend to assume good intentions on the part of any person. But I’ve just got to say something about some of the aphorisms that are repeatedly offered here with respect to trading. Either:
- They are brilliant nuggets of wisdom which I am simply too thick to understand (and this is not false modesty; I absolutely accept that I might be too stupid to “get it”), or
- They are absurd bromides which sound pithy but in fact are pointless.
The ones that have come up again and again that prompted this post are:
- “Only price pays.”
- “Trade the chart in front of you.”
I’m sure there are others, but I’m going to focus on those two for the moment.
As for the first, “only price pays,” I assume what’s being expressed there is that opinions, bloviating, arguing, or passionately-held views are irrelevant, and that only a price moving up or down is going to contribute to your profit or loss.
I can accept that. But……….so what? What is one supposed to draw from this? To me, it’s the same thing as saying “Breathing is vital to living” or “Water is essential for survival.” Both absolutely true, but also completely meaningless. So does anyone want to enlighten me as to the brilliance of announcing that only price pays? Armed with this insight, what does one henceforth do or not do?
As for the second, as a person who has dedicated his life to financial charts, this one is extra-baffling to me: to “trade the chart in front of you“. What, pray tell, does anything think I’ve been doing? Trading the chart behind me? Below me? In a football stadium hundreds of miles away?
I assume the chunk o’ wisdom is meant to say that one mustn’t get married to a disposition about the market, which I suppose makes sense. But how does that work in real life? Take last Friday, for instance (please!) How would one trade that chart in front of them? Rather schizophrenically, I suppose, considering what happened. Do you just buy everything in sight, because the market is going up for the time being? For me, I simply don’t understand how one should behave based on embracing the Oracle-of-Delphia level of wisdom from telling someone to trade what is in front of them.
I do think there are some useful nuggets out there, and I’ve gone through hundreds of them and plucked out ten that resonate with me. Here ya go:
If you have any other good ones to add, or you have a erudite explanation for the two curious examples I provided at top, leave them in comments. Oh, and remember to breathe.
