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Elliott Wave Principle: Believe This and Go Broke Trading

Elliott Wave Principle: Believe This and Go Broke Trading
Elliott Wave Principle: Believe This and Go Broke Trading

It never dies.

People just want to believe.

Consider this excerpt:

The Elliott Wave Principle posits that collective investor psychology, or crowd psychology, moves between optimism and pessimism in natural sequences. These mood swings create patterns evidenced in the price movements of markets at every degree of trend or time scale. In Elliott’s model, market prices alternate between an impulsive, or motive phase, and a corrective phase on all time scales of trend, as the illustration shows. Impulses are always subdivided into a set of 5 lower-degree waves, alternating again between motive and corrective character, so that waves 1, 3, and 5 are impulses, and waves 2 and 4 are smaller retraces of waves 1 and 3. Corrective waves subdivide into 3 smaller-degree waves starting with a five-wave counter-trend impulse, a retrace, and another impulse. In a bear market the dominant trend is downward, so the pattern is reversed—five waves down and three up. Motive waves always move with the trend, while corrective waves move against it. The patterns link to form five and three-wave structures which themselves underlie self-similar wave structures of increasing size or higher degree. Note the lowermost of the three idealized cycles. In the first small five-wave sequence, waves 1, 3 and 5 are motive, while waves 2 and 4 are corrective. This signals that the movement of the wave one degree higher is upward. It also signals the start of the first small three-wave corrective sequence. After the initial five waves up and three waves down, the sequence begins again and the self-similar fractal geometry begins to unfold according to the five and three-wave structure which it underlies one degree higher. The completed motive pattern includes 89 waves, followed by a completed corrective pattern of 55 waves. Each degree of a pattern in a financial market has a name. Practitioners use symbols for each wave to indicate both function and degree—numbers for motive waves, letters for corrective waves (shown in the highest of the three idealized series of wave structures or degrees). Degrees are relative; they are defined by form, not by absolute size or duration. Waves of the same degree may be of very different size and/or duration. The classification of a wave at any particular degree can vary, though practitioners generally agree on the standard order of degrees (approximate durations given):

-Grand supercycle: multi-century
-Supercycle: multi-decade (about 40–70 years)
-Cycle: one year to several years (or even several decades under an Elliott Extension)
-Primary: a few months to a couple of years
-Intermediate: weeks to months
-Minor: weeks
-Minute: days
-Minuette: hours
-Subminuette: minutes

Amazing.

Elliott Wave prose is almost as good as Scientology: Definitely No PhD Required.


How can you move forward immediately to Trend Following profits? My books and my Flagship Course and Systems are trusted options by clients in 70+ countries.

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Trend Following is for beginners, students and pros in all countries. This is not day trading 5-minute bars, prediction or analyzing fundamentals–it’s Trend Following.

Ep. 607: Robert Carver Interview with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio

Robert Carver
Robert Carver

 

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My guest today is Robert Carver. He got his start in finance working at trend following firm AHL in 2001 during his final year of college. He was introduced to quantitative trading while at AHL and for the first time began thinking of finance in a systematic way. He later went back to AHL, working there from 2006-2013. It took a lot of research and digging for Robert to decipher which financial tools available to traders were appropriate for him. He knew he was not the only trader with this problem so he decided to write a book laying out what he had found through his research. Robert gives actionable tips and guidelines for others who may need help finding what trading instruments are right for them. Robert also wanted “Smart Portfolios” to be a book for the average investor. He wrote it in a way that is not over complicated. Any trader, new or professional, can pick it up and find it useful.

The topics are his books Systematic Trading: A unique new method for designing trading and investing systems and Smart Portfolios: A Practical Guide to Building and Maintaining Intelligent Investment Portfolios.

In this episode of Trend Following Radio we discuss:

  • Portfolio selection
  • Benchmarks
  • International investing
  • Fundamental trading
  • Warren Buffett trading
  • Expected average performance
  • Leveraging a portfolio
  • Luck vs. Skill
  • Venture capitalism

“Most people probably spend much less time thinking about their portfolio’s than they do thinking about getting their car fixed.” – Robert Carver

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Ep. 577: Art Collins Interview with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio

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My guest today is Art Collins, the author of “Beating the Financial Futures Market: Combining Small Biases Into Powerful Money Making Strategies”, “When Supertraders Meet Kryptonite”, “Market Rap: The Odyssey of a Still-Struggling Commodity Trader” and “Market Beaters.” He has been trading systematically for the past 30 years. Throughout the years Art wasn’t only focused on trading markets. He also studied how to beat the blackjack table and how to skew the odds in his favor when betting on sports.

The topic is trading.

In this episode of Trend Following Radio we discuss:

  • Systems trading
  • Richard Dennis
  • Card Counting
  • Mechanical systems
  • Robustness
  • Data mining

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No Memory Trading Courtesy of TurtleTrader William Eckhardt

William Eckhardt, the great trend-following trader, has spoken forcefully about the idea of not having a memory in your trading:

“Suppose two traders, A and B, are alike in most respects except the amount of money they have. Suppose A has 10 per cent less money but he initiates a trade first. He gets in earlier than B does. By the time B puts the trade on, the two traders have exactly the same equity. The best course of action has to be the same for both of these traders now. Mind you, these traders have very different entry prices. What this means is that once an initiation is made, it does not matter at all for subsequent decisions what the entry price was. It does not matter. Once you have made an initiation, what your initiation price was has no relevance. The trader must literally trade as though he doesn’t know what his initiation price is.”

Don’t forget it.


How can you move forward immediately to Trend Following profits? My books and my Flagship Course and Systems are trusted options by clients in 70+ countries.

Also jump in:

Trend Following Podcast Guests
Frequently Asked Questions
Performance
Research
Markets to Trade
Crisis Times
Trading Technology
About Us

Trend Following is for beginners, students and pros in all countries. This is not day trading 5-minute bars, prediction or analyzing fundamentals–it’s Trend Following.

Trend Follower Robert Rotella: Avoid Tinkering

Insights:

The firm’s chief researcher Robert Rotella will go back and look at the models to see whether there is anything unsound about the way they are programmed. Generally, there is not.

Next, a check is made to see whether there is a way to improve the model. Such improvements have to made with caution, he says, because the whole idea of being a systematic trader is to have robust systems in place that don’t have to be tweaked all the time.

The more a trader tinkers, the more he has to worry about curve fitting. While Rotella, an absolute disciple of robust models, doesn’t like to fiddle with its models, there is sometimes no choice if the market sends a message that losses continue even after delevering.

“Obviously you don’t want to overhaul a program in response to one year just because something didn’t work. That’s when you’re almost guaranteed that it would have worked the next year had you kept it in there.”

If you keep it changing it, you have no system.


How can you move forward immediately to Trend Following profits? My books and my Flagship Course and Systems are trusted options by clients in 70+ countries.

Also jump in:

Trend Following Podcast Guests
Frequently Asked Questions
Performance
Research
Markets to Trade
Crisis Times
Trading Technology
About Us

Trend Following is for beginners, students and pros in all countries. This is not day trading 5-minute bars, prediction or analyzing fundamentals–it’s Trend Following.

Ewan Kirk of Cantab on Trend Following

Excerpt:

Our philosophy rests upon two main pillars. The first pillar is: macro, not micro. So we trade macro variables, not stocks and shares and credit default swaps and things like that. We trade across currencies, commodities, interest rates, bonds and equity indices. The second pillar is: a systematic approach, not a discretionary approach. So we describe our style as systematic global macro. Systematic trading involves coming up with a statistical model of the markets. Assuming that model has worked in the past, and that you have developed and researched and tested your model correctly, then your hypothesis is that it’s likely to keep working in the future. So the actual execution of trades is just continuing to follow what the model says. Now that sounds quite mechanical. In fact, it’s no different than the way any good investor works. Why would you invest with Warren Buffett? Because, over the past 30 years, Warren Buffett has made money, and you’re assuming that’s going to continue in the future. Conceptually, that’s no different than what we do.

When I use the term “scientist” to describe myself and my colleagues at Cantab, what I’m really talking about is a mindset. It’s a mindset of evidence based investing and using the scientific method to think about investing. The scientific method has worked pretty well for the human race for the last 2,000 years—it’s worked out better than superstition, anyway. And we believe in applying the same rigorous principles as in medicine or air traffic control. Everyone is quite happy with evidence-based medicine and air traffic control—would you fly in a plane controlled by someone who just had a gut feeling about where they wanted to go?

When people ask: What do you think is going to happen in the future? We always say: We don’t know. I can’t really project whether next year will be a good year for Cantab or a bad year.

Ignore at your peril.


How can you move forward immediately to Trend Following profits? My books and my Flagship Course and Systems are trusted options by clients in 70+ countries.

Also jump in:

Trend Following Podcast Guests
Frequently Asked Questions
Performance
Research
Markets to Trade
Crisis Times
Trading Technology
About Us

Trend Following is for beginners, students and pros in all countries. This is not day trading 5-minute bars, prediction or analyzing fundamentals–it’s Trend Following.

Ep. 466: Don’t Worship the Computer with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio

Don’t Worship the Computer with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio
Don’t Worship the Computer with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio

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Please enjoy my monologue Don’t Worship the Computer with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio. This episode may also include great outside guests from my archive.

In this episode of Trend Following Radio:

  • “Super computers”
  • Systematic trading
  • Creating algorithms
  • Coding
  • Machines replacing humans
  • Breaking down the use of software

“…The power of computers owes nothing (save speed) to the causal peculiarities of electrons darting about on silicon chips…” – Daniel Dennett

“Trend following trader = CPA not AI singularity theorist.” – Michael Covel

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