То, о чем я неоднократно говорил и буду говорить, хорошо сказано авторитетом уровнем повыше меня. И об интуиции и о значении прайс экшн и классических основ технического анализа.

Это всего лишь Bruce Kamich, CMT, is a vice president at Morgan Stanley Smith Barney’s Technical Analysis Group and coauthors their flagship publication the Daily Technical Market Letter. He also teaches technical analysis to various Morgan Stanley Smith Barney trading desks. Kamich has held a variety of positions related to research and technical analysis at firms such as McCarthy, Crisanti and Maffei; ALCO Commodities; and Merrill Lynch. He is an adjunct professor of finance at Baruch College and has also taught at Rutgers University, as well as being guest lecturer on many other campuses. He has twice served as president of the Market Technicians Association (MTA) and is currently president of the MTA Educational Foundation. Kamich is the author of How Technical Analysis Works (NYIF/Prentice Hall Press, 2002). He lives in New Jersey.

Одно время я переписывался часто с chief technical stategist of Morgan Stanley- Rick Bensignor.  И я не был институциональным клиентом и он ни с кем не перписывался, но мы разделяли вгляды и по видиому Bruce такого же покроя.


"Заметьте, не я это сказал..." НО как будто мои слова

Why Study Patterns?

In midtown Manhattan; in Greenwich, Connecticut, and in other financial centers, legions of MBAs sit in front of computer terminals armed with algorithms and models to trade the markets, but can they “read” and anticipate the markets? Maybe. Can they judge one stock versus others? Perhaps. Can they understand the “personality” of the market that comes through the chart? I don’t think so. There are many things that can influence stock prices, but many of them cannot be quantified—for example, an evaluation of management, market sentiment, and sociological and psychological factors. The more you look at factors that cannot be nailed down by hard numbers, the more you should look at the chart of the stock. The chart of the stock or index or commodity reflects everyone’s opinion about all factors—ones we can and cannot quantify. But the stock chart also gives a complete picture of a company’s price history over any number of time spans. The chartist or technical analyst can see all this history at a glance. Can these bright graduates read beyond what they believe they can model? Do they ever get a “feel” for the markets and seem to be totally in sync like an athlete in “the zone”? At times, an accomplished chart reader can have a sixth sense about future price movements, just like an athlete who can sense an opponent’s next move. Given the right math skills or computer programming background, pretty much anyone can build a trading model. If a new variable comes along or if the importance of an old variable changes, the model probably won’t adapt and will have to be refitted at some point. In an interview in the January 2009 issue of Bloomberg Markets, billionaire investor Wilbur Ross notes that computer risk models cannot replace good old real-world knowledge: “I think the real thing is not to confuse paper with what’s the real world.” You can’t get more real than today’s stock price.

The basic purpose of chart reading is to see the past history of a stock and to judge the probable strength of demand and supply at various price levels and to predict the direction of prices. The clues to a stock’s movement are recorded on the chart if one takes the time to learn. When new variables come along they show up in the price action right away; there is no need to go back and change formulas. I have a book in my office about neural networks with the subtitle Gaining Predictive Edge in the Market. With nonlinear methods entrenched for more than a decade, the new edge in predicting and trading the markets should circle back to the early days of charting.

With so many traders and so much money going toward black-box systems and sophisticated math-driven programs to get their “edge,” one can easily believe that the real edge now is reverting back, in part, to the “old-school ways” that Wilbur Ross might endorse. One can easily see the bias toward indicators, math, and back testing by the kinds of articles in the popular industry magazines, the seminars for the public, and various webinars today. I find it interesting that in other areas of life there is a return by successful practitioners to the older, hands-on methods of doing things. For example, artists in the kitchen have returned to old ways of cooking, baking, and preparing food in reaction to the mass-produced and heavily processed foods of today. A number of the popular chiefs today have spent time learning from authentic cooks and butchers in Tuscany or in small villages in France, for example. The New York Times “Dining & Wine” section has reported on artists’ collectives in Brooklyn, New York, where people are making pickles, cheeses, and chocolates by hand. There are a number of art colonies around the country where you can find craftspeople returning to their roots or their grandparent’s roots to make musical instruments, furniture, rugs, and even canoes.

Chart reading takes a bit of intuition and the belief that these patterns actually work. This belief should be based on experience; seeing these patterns work in real time is learning by example. In my undergraduate course on technical analysis, I make all my students maintain a bar chart of a stock every day for the semester. The personal construction of a chart keeps them in touch with the market’s fluctuations and can convince them in real time that formations like flags and pennants really work, although this may need to be pointed out to them the first few times.

Intuition isn’t something one can teach, but the prepared mind can be trained to be more intuitive. By looking at enough charts and patterns, my students become like the original ticker tape watchers back in the early 1900s who could not escape the tape. Traders eighty years ago studied the bid or offer quote for each security they followed and the tape action with the volume behind each trade. These tape watchers could sense when a stock was under accumulation. They looked for a stock that rallied on one thousand shares and fell on a few hundred. Seeing a stock advance on increased volume and decline on lighter volume is how tape readers decided on what stocks to buy. Retail traders were still reading the tape in the 1960s and early 1970s, but tape watchers drifted away from the boardrooms of brokerage houses when someone decided the ticker tape was an unnecessary expense. When the ticker tape disappeared, the account executives (as they were called back then) got the New York Stock Exchange tape streaming on their desktops. Because professional money management has replaced individual stock picking, account executives have become advisers, and the advice has changed.

Although the tape can still be seen on CNBC or Bloomberg Television, the skills of the tape reader have disappeared. Some daytrading firms have tried to bring this skill back with the detailed reading of market-maker quotes. When everyone else in your firm or on the Street is programming and searching on a computer for patterns and intermarket relationships in the data and they get away from seeing patterns, a return to this approach could give you a real edge. Today more than ever, I believe the person who can look at the market in the old way can learn to outperform in this formulaic-driven market.