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bullmarket said:2) There is no rule in trading/investing that I have seen that says that one must recover losses in the same stock(s) that created them in the first place. Why not consider putting the funds you are considering averaging down with into another stock that is at least trending up and with hopefully better fundamentals and outlook. I've seen many people turn originally short term trades into long term 'investments' hoping falling stock prices will recover eventually. Some will, some won't.
I disagree ducat.
If there is a trend down and you cannot understand what it is based on what you have worked out in a fundamental sense then you need to assume you may not know everything. If the trend is based on some short term factor and you are looking long term then what you say will make more sense.
Regarding your comment that a 50/50 event offers no probabililty of an outcome, I believe that view is totally wrong . Surely even calling heads on a toss of a coin, with its 50/50 possible outcome, gives you a probability of 50% in being right. So even in your case where you believe a trend is a prediction of the future (and in your case only a 50/50 prediction) then you are in effect saying that you still have a 50% probability of predicting the future direction of the trend.
While that may indeed be the case, in reality, it happens very rarely.
If it should occur, then I would have no business taking a position.
Technical trends are meaningless, as they are largely populated by technical traders who are in large part meaningless, due to their reliance on stoplosses.
wayneL said:Not quite Snake. Dollar cost averaging is when buys occur at regular intervals whether the stock is going down OR up. The price movement is irrelevant
Averaging down only buys additional shares as the shares become """"cheaper"""".
Your posts always contain some sort of logic, even if tenuous or faultily constructed because of your emotional bias against t/a-stoplosses etc.
Your logic is self defeating. If trends are largely populated by tech traders, these selfsame traders can hardly be meaningless now can they? And what have stoplosses to do with a trend?
In actual fact tech traders are mostly meaningless (the only sub-point you jagged here) as trends are largely populated by investors...f/a investors! It is they who create the trend. They are the "THEY" that we tech traders refer to obliquely and ad naseum
Financial market trends are deeply rooted in human psychology and nothing to do with t/a. T/a just plots it on (electronic) graph paper.
Ducat, don't get caught up in the psychobabble that surrounds Warrren Buffett. I invest like you. I do OK.
If you are talking about noise then ignore the chart but clear movements mean something, could be insider trading.
I pay some attention to charts though they don't make my decision for me. What you are saying is betraying you as a babe in the woods. Beware the wolf!
Please don't take this badly. You are on the right path. Take our comments in and think about them. What makes a winner is that he/she learns!
ducati916 said:That stoploss is defined by a squiggly line that means what?
It means absolutely nothing. ZERO.
In reality it is dictated by his RISK MANAGEMENT.
I do not know what I am doing, therefore, I must limit my risk, engendered by my pitiful lack of knowledge, and place a stoploss.
bullmarket said:Hi ducati
I disagree with your comment below.
I believe stop losses are a crucial concept that especially short term traders should include in their trading strategies/plan.
I don't believe at all that a stop loss level means nothing. What it means to me is that the trader admits that at the stop loss level his/her expected price action did not eventuate (and no-one will have 100% winning trades) and the likelihood of their expectations occuring within a reasonably short time is low. Hence in order to preserve capital the trader sells out at the stop loss level to look for better opportunities elsewhere. Obviously everyone will hope their stop loss levels are not hit too often.
You're going to be hard pressed to convince me that there are not any very successful and profitable technical analysts out there who use stop losses as part of their strategy. Some of them even go on to write books about it.
How a trader sets his/her stop loss levels is purely up to them according to their objectives and risk tolerances as there is no one-size-fits-all method for setting stop losses
Imo, given that no-one in the long run will have 100% of winning trades the vast majority of traders will most likely experience a large number of small winning trades cancelling out a large number of small losing trades (assuming the use of well set stop losses) with then hopefully a few trades going off on reasonably good profit runs.
Imo Rule #1 in trading is Preserve Your Capital and using stop losses is a good way to do that.
Good luck with your trading/investing
cheers
bullmarket
TA is such a broad church (as is FA ) I find it comical that you have a single set definition of what a technical trader is and what he/she is trying to achieve, and set about lampooning all TA based on the one model. (TA is lagging? ...like FA isn't? AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAH!)
You can bluster and pontificate all you like. But the reality is journeymen TA traders regularly extract attractive returns from the market. The apprentices and pretenders may struggle, but the jouneymen outperform. (FA practitioners experiences are the same )
Your continuous bleating about TA being nonsense, and scarcely veiled personal sleights of practitioners, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, is making me seriously question your ability to logic. I mean it's so simple a concept. Your intellectual need for complexity is blinding you to reality.
Duc, you don't have to look at charts if you don't want to. It's OK, we won't think less of you for that. But it's kind of infantile to argue against reality. We make money. Full stop. Case closed.
It seems you have this intellectual immaturity that must denigrate all other forms of study in order to justify your own. As a society, most of us moved past that soon after The Inquisition.
The TA traders here have resisted in denigrating FA out of the sense of reality I was speaking of, and out of plain good manners.
Now Puleeeze drop the TA bagging, it is getting monotonous, and it drags the forum down to the level of the rubbish forums around.
State your case for FA, by all means, but c'mon.... reasoned logic only.
I have never stated that ALL technical traders lose money.....just most of them.
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