Essence of Trading: The Three Pillars of Critical Thinking (Part 2)

facts… continue from part 1

“Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance”
– Confucious

Objective Evaluation Is Difficult

To observe and collect evidence from something physical is quite different from doing the same on abstract data. Physical evidence like a kid who got a black eye after school is easy to identify that his eye was hurt and it is not a usual school day. Further investigation into the matter will tell you more, whether the kid has hurt himself in an accident or from a fight. Once we have the facts on hand, it is easy to make better judgement after understanding what really happened in the situation.

A market moving higher (or lower) has no visual indication whether it is rising too far too fast (or dropping too quick too deep). It is up to the person who is tracking the market to identify the condition alone. That makes it very difficult to even get to the point with the facts straighten out as we do not have a scientific framework to start with. Do not get me started on how bad classic economic theories are from this pseudo science that tainted the name of science for centuries.

All Boils Down To The Study Of Price

To put the market condition in context, majority of people tend to guess and valuate the situation with superficial personal imagination, borrowed experience from other life experience, reading from trading books in a rush, and worse of all accepting mainstream media reporting. All these actions lead to bad observations as the classification or explanation obtained from these means are not scientific nor reasonable. Accepting these observations as your own is no difference from telling yourself you are standing on the ground now so it must be alright to leap forward where in reality you are standing at the edge of a cliff where you will face sure death should you jump forward.

In short, a framework of price behaviour has to be ingrained into yourself first so that it is possible to allow you to grow your knowledge of the markets internally to the point that you can proficiently observe and make dispassionate judgement of the current market conditions without being interfered by others. Due to the fact that there is no evidence from the past on how the markets behaved outside of their historical price data (with bits and pieces of news event schedules), it is obvious that the first viable solution is to study the historical data.

Hence, the study of price behaviour, or chart reading, is the only logical path to follow.

[DTBpromo]

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *