I have to be honest, as someone who is not fully immersed in the financial markets, the chart pattern reading kinda strikes me as astrology for guys in suits.
I feel this deep in my bones
astrology for guys in suits
Naw they already made that, it’s called the “Myers-Briggs Type Indicator”.
Different parts of astrology. The MBTI stuff replaces the horoscope/personality side of things, whereas chart reading replaces the future readings.
And apparently my team at work. It’s more of a curiosity (oh, you’re somewhat extroverted? Interesting!), and it gives us a chance to ask questions to get to know a new hire.
If you’re making actual decisions based on the MBTI test, then that’s on you. But it’s kinda fun to compare.
It’s used widely for actual hiring decisions. If you’re qualified for a job but they want an INTJ but you’re an ENTJ according the overgrown Facebook quiz, you get a rejection letter.
It’s unethical as fuck, and absolutely rampant in corporate America.
Now, as a team building exercise or role play to get to know potential clientele, yeah no harm.
To a large extent it is, the major difference being that when people take actions based of these signs, it influences which way the chart goes next, unlike the planets, which do not care the slightest what people do based on their actions. Thus you can end up making a lot of money if your actions are 1) correctly anticipating subsequent actions by other people and 2) sufficiently in advance of other actions. Which makes inside trading and pump-and-dump schemes great ways to get filthy rich, if you find yourself in a position to be able to pull that off. Or if you are lucky. Or if you have made a name for yourself and everyone else just assume you know what you are doing and follows (Warren Buffet comes to mind).
Right but the planets being in particular locations in the sky doesn’t really result in astrologists saying a particular thing is going to happen. They basically just make something up and then decide that’s what the planet says. They could basically just ignore the positions of the planet and it wouldn’t really make any difference.
Otherwise history would repeat every couple of decades.
That makes sense. Essentially, there are things that are influenced by perception and those that are immune to perception.
Yes, and by the sheer existence of the concept of a “death cross”, and now that it has happened for the Tesla stock, people will act as if whatever a “death cross” predicts will come to pass. So even though there was some correlation before someone formulated it as a concept, now the response will be different because people will act on it. If enough people believes it, it will probably just accelerate the process as they will seek to sell off before the downturn, pushing the prices down. Which is the way the Tesla stock should go, so I am all for this cross of death.
Warren Buffet comes to mind
But Warren Buffet does know what he’s doing. He doesn’t buy based on charts though, he buys based on fundamentals, and many of his bets take years to prove themselves.
I think this is more applicable to the vast swarms of YT influencers who push trading software. Get enough viewers and rent enough Lambos and people will think you know something. Or maybe even people like Jim Cramer, who has a mediocre success rate in his own trading firm, yet still has his picks get parroted because he has a TV show.
Don’t blindly buy stuff because someone else tells you to, or even because someone else does. Buy stuff because you know what you’re doing. If you don’t know what you’re doing (the vast majority of people), just buy diversified index funds. In the US, this means something like VTI and VXUS, or the various equivalents in various brokerages/retirement plans. That’s what I do, and I’ve had a pretty good experience so far, no experience reading tea leaves required.
Oh my God this is so f-ing true. It makes me think a lot of sociology classes I took in college where we’d talk about the artificiality of money how it’s only meaningful because we have collectively decided it is. The folks who try to make it all scientific with lots of elaborate analytics and complex charts are basically just engaging a social math exercise.
Money is an emotional thing. Do I believe that this coin / bit of paper / number on a website is something that I can exchange for goods and services? If not enough people believe that, that currency will collapse.
Mind you, not using money is inefficient at scale. Sending the bag of potatoes that I’ve grown in my garden this month to my internet provider for continued shitposting privileges only goes so far.
Money is an emotional thing. Do I believe that this coin / bit of paper / number on a website is something that I can exchange for goods and services? If not enough people believe that, that currency will collapse.
That’s not true at all. You know most of the reason why your currency works? It’s not based on tinker bell. It’s based upon the fact that the government collects taxes from you in it. It’s also based upon the fact that other countries will accept it as repayment of debt or face military consequences.
Now, stock prices are mostly irrational – though some companies do actually produce valuable goods and services and own infrastructure – I’ll grant you that. But belief has very little to do with USD being more than green-tinted paper.
As someone with an actual Econ degree:
… Yeah, a whole lot of ‘technical signals’ aka, chart reading that a lot of ‘retail’ (ie, amateur) day traders use… is basically astrology.
Its not quite as absolutely nonsensical as astrology, which is just absolutely 100% bullshit… like, a 50 MA crossing a 200 MA downward… definitely does indicate that stock is not having a great time right now… but as far as the “power” of such a signal to reliably indicate future trends?
No, basically no. There are some technical indicators that have a slightly higher correlation coefficient of being a reliable leading indicator, but the correlations are not really that strong… there are just way too many other confounding variables.
…
Even the quants who work for hedge funds… who use some of the most advanced and complex mathematical models in the world to try to untangle all of those confounding effects…
…well, they are on average, over a decently long timescale, no better, or even slightly worse than random chance at picking stocks, bonds, a portfolio that will grow more than just the average.
Part of this is because… if a technical trading strategy that actually works to generate outsized gains… is actually figured out by one of the big boy quants… the other big boy quants will notice this and reverse engineer it from analyzing what their rival is doing.
Then, once all the big boys are using the same strategy… well now it doesn’t return outsized gains anymore.
… Which is why all your 401ks are basically index funds for their stock component, which is just a weighted average basket of whichever particular market, usually the DJIA or SP500 as the Nasdaq is historically a bit more volatile.
…
Now, all that being said… one arguably ‘technical indicator’ that always has been correct in the last 100 years… is when the bond yield curve inverts… the economy and stock market generally suffer a downturn roughly proportional to the time and magnitude of the bond yield curve inversion… soon after or right as the bond yield curve uninverts.
Except for right now, the last few years.
We have now, in the last 4 or 5 years, had 3 periods of yield curve inversion, 2 uninversions… and the broader economy has technically not yet entered into a recession, a period of negative GDP growth.
But it looks like we are heading now for basically something akin to the Great Depression, as the latest inversion is pretty widely being interpreted as ‘investors no longer see the US Bonds as the defacto save haven, the USD as the defacto world currency’… which means the dollar will devalue as demand for it goes down… which means even if the tariffs went away and never came back, all our imports would be more expensive… and our exports won’t be worth as much… and our external debt to other countries will become even more onerous…
And we are kind of massively reliant on importing material things and exporting services or non physical ‘products’.
(Great work Mr. Trump -.-)
So… yeah you can’t really make a day trading strategy out of that.
…
Beyond all that, its probably also worth mentioning that GDP per capita is not a reliable measure of actual wellbeing of the population of a country when it has enormous wealth disparity.
