Showtime across all the indices. Make or break inflection points, no doubt, from the ‘experts’ to financial media to surviving trader to newbie. But drift away with me briefly to consider a crude rendering of a mode of living.
You are young and taught principles by which to live; iterations of value systems ingested and regurgitated from momma bird to baby bird – systems largely reflecting dominant ideological structures. You adopt appealing formulaic methods to approach issues/moments in life, and fight for said approaches as if they had a stake in your success. You infuse palpability into frameworks that exist to organize, standardize, and regulate thought and behavior. In a drive for stability and validation, you stake your identity on them.
You grow up and begin to experience asymmetry. Why didn’t this add up like it was supposed to? What happened to linearity? You question the dominant frameworks. Why didn’t the time-tested, expertly disseminated method work? In a huff of angst, you do the expected: polarize. You embrace the opposite and suffuse the oppositional binary pervasively across all modes of engagement. You are the rebel with all the answers privy to an alternate existence concealed from the masses. You thrive on the exclusivity, and mock the sheep.
You later become cognizant of the interplay between dominant conceptions and their opposites. You recognize instances where one mode modifies and informs the other. You gesture toward the understanding of scenarios that call for reinforcement of the standard and others where you can take advantage of that predictability and manipulate the sample to advance personal goals for profit. You play the players.
You finally see life as a mechanistic Multivac reduction, inputs and outputs within a system perpetuated by parties of survivalists with varying degrees of clout and stake in its maintenance. You’re left disillusioned, tightening your readership base, trusting fewer sources, seeking elemental bricks and mortar fused into a foundation on which to stand. The playing field is littered with broken participants plugged into a broken system.
You channel the Descartes approach and restate what you know: dominance acts as a standard reference point, a proxy of expectation you synthesize to base your decisions – to comply or deviate, and in what capacity. When was the last time a classic head and shoulders topping pattern actually worked? Are hammer candlesticks following pullbacks/downdrafts oversignalized? When should the ‘major’ levels be traversed or not? Who’s trapping who? You go to church and throw money in the tithe basket whether you believe or not. Don’t you?
You look at oil. Why so many sketchy headlines at the highs of this range? Why haven’t such conditions pushed this thing to/over 50? Why does this structure feel like a pump and dump (used to trade pennies)? Is the correlation between oil and the market breaking? What happens to the market if oil drops 5%?
Quick, you say. The axioms. The AXIOMS. Where are the AXIOMS!?!?! “Don’t trade the patterns, trade the patternists.” “Don’t trade the fundamentals, trade the fundamentalists.” “Don’t trade the psychology, trade the psychologists.”
Fibers winding up. Tension. TENSION.
We hold the rope on both sides.
P.S Get processing power that algorithmically adapts to market conditions with Exodus, traders successfully grappling with price in the TradeLounge, and expert training from OA in next week’s Boot Camp. iBC professional learning community is handling this market context better than anyone out there. Tune in.
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