Indulge me in a bit of a thought experiment.
Let’s say there was a fellow here in Palo Alto named Brad. He told me that he had invented the world’s perfect tiger repellant. He simply sprayed it on, and voila, no tigers would bother him.
This was intriguing to me, because I had, in turn, created a tiger attractant. My claim was that this invisible spray would attract tigers from several miles away.
The trouble was, my spray just didn’t seem to work. Try as I might, no tigers ever appeared. Not even once. Back when I was roaming around Indonesia and Sumatra, tigers would show up all the time. But here in Palo Alto, it just didn’t work anymore.
Brad, on the other hand, roamed the streets of my fair city without any fear of tiger attack. His spray, it seemed, was 100% effective. My spray didn’t work. His did.
But here’s the thing…………..the truth of the matter is, my spray worked perfectly and his was, in fact, just water. Totally inert. The reason his spray seemed so good at repelling tigers is that, between you and me, there aren’t any tigers in Palo Alto. Not even rich ones.
And that’s kind of the situation I find myself in. Because I have some trading friends who, over the past several years, have been doing fantastic with their various indicators and systems. If you look at their trading, they basically are just long all the time, so it’s not shock that they’re making money. And they want me to use these systems too, and it would seem logical to do so, because, well, they’re making money. And the tigers are staying away.
But the simple fact of the matter is that these “systems” are merely lucky beneficiaries of a completely distorted market environment. These systems probably provided, in real life, as much marginal advantage as the aforementioned tiger repellent. That is, as long as there aren’t any tigers, then you can rest assured you won’t be bothered by any big felines.
As for my tiger attractant, no matter how good it is, if the tigers simply aren’t around, they aren’t available to attract………..that is, until an environment more similar to Jakarta returns. What I’m trying to say is that the siren song of the aforementioned systems has no allure for me. They don’t sing to me the way charts do, and frankly, once the tigers show up again, I don’t think they stand a chance.
via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1yE4I5Q Tim Knight from Slope of Hope