[DesertCat]

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My original upset does lie solely with Desert Cat by trying to limit someones mind and limit their learning about the market. My way or the highway posts make for lousy boards.

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I didn't try to limit anyone. I just pointed out to a novice that there is another approach used by very successful investors that he might want to examine. I did make a snarky response to Mr. Baseball's snarky response.

I'm happy to have all the TA guys here have their TA discussions. But for every successful TA practitioner there are also unsuccessful ones, probably many. And I think you all know that TA is beloved by and promoted by brokerage firms because it promotes heavy turnover and reaps lots of commissions from their customers. I think those firms propagate a lot of misinformation because of that. So when a newbie comes onto the board I like to counter some of this brokerage propaganda to make sure they first try to read a general purpose investing book.

And I'm not telling people "TA sucks, do FA". My standard advice is to practice passive portfolio investing with index funds. Just because I might be successful with FA doesn't mean everyone can be, there is a lot more to it than reading financial statements, esp. psychologically, and few people are willing and able to make the proper commitment to succeed at it. Most people should just not be active investors or traders.

When I first started posting here I definitely thought TA was worthless, given the large amount of academic research that showed little evidence it works. But Sniper and others here convinced me I don't know everything about TA, and there can be some successful individual TA practitioners. Just as academic research shows that most "value investment" funds have trouble beating the market while the skilled guys like buffett crush it. I think that both TA & FA are dangerous in the hands of a newbie who doesn't know what they are doing.

I'll leave the remainder of this thread to TA folks talking about TA.