Topic: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion - page 24674. (Read 26713928 times)

Either all exchanges are 100% straight-up legit and market manipulation doesn't exist, or you're wrong

Man, don't get lost in semantics. We are not all equals. Many are clueless and useless bags of future composts. Study after study show this.

EDIT:
i didn't mean that you in particular are useless, sorry if it sounded that way - in fact i remember enjoying reading your article

That theory is not supported by the evidence.

Study after study shows that everybody who thinks they have an edge eventually, inexorably, loses it.

The edge is an illusion.

Player A is good at zero-sum game.
Player B, a typical investment aficionado, sucks at it.
Player A loses as much as player B because Bitcoin math.

No no, i agree and know about statistics. But the possibility of a trade being successful is not a random variable, it is not like throwing a dice. There is asymmetric access to information, and for information i mean both market data and its interpretations. How many market participants know the dynamics of stop hunting? How many are able to spot accumulation by big players, and what are accumulating? How many can take a loss soon, with no emotions, and let a win ride while being as cold as iron? How many dare to throw bids during the worse moments of a panic? How many are willing to go against the masses when they are more irrational than usual? Not many. If you can do any of these things you already have an edge in the game. Those that have an edge win.

Obviously if you only look at a single round of a zero sum game you'll find winners and losers.

The point is that nobody can remain a winner in the long term.

Play enough rounds and eventually your track record will converge to the same as everybody else's.

Mathematically, this must be the case.

I mean, in a zero-sum game where the majority is losing, somebody has to win.

@JorgeStolfi:
These market movements represent each 2 EW upward sub-sub-waves of wave C. The second one took about 4 times longer, for various reasons.

EMH says (if that is your thing)

Passive investment with wide diversification within asset classes in your portfolio beats active portfolio management in the long run.

(though more rational traders can sometimes profit from less rational traders imo)
 

Middlemen Bookies

The people who earn a cut on every trade, and the people who get out of the ponzi scheme first.

Here's what happened:

In 1978 the US passed a law that introduced the 401k.

The effect of this law was to funnel a huge amount of money into the markets in an attempt to escape taxation. This happened right as the Baby Boomers were approaching their peak earning years.

All this money being forcefully shoved into the market solely because of tax policy, instead of because there was something actually worth buying, bid up the prices of everything into the stratosphere, and all the people on Wall Street thought they were geniuses just for being there when the money spigot opened.

Most slot machines have a average payout of < 100%. Imagine if you were playing on a slot machine with a 120% average payout. Play on that machine long enough and you'll eventually delude yourself into imagining you're some kind of god of probability.

This was all well and good until the demographics shifted and all of a sudden there were more people wanting to pull money out of the market than were adding new money into it.

Naturally, the market crashed.

Now a bunch of rich, deluded, (mostly) sociopaths screamed, and cried, and stomped their feet, and threatened Congress with tanks in the street, unless they got bailouts.

Now the Federal Reserve prints new money into existence for the primary dealers to pour into the market to make up for the missing Baby Boomer earnings.

Thus, we all lose because of inflation (except for the sociopaths).

Explanation

As I said, (and Justus) I don't think anyone can!

Leave my balls alone plz, they are for spoodergril only.



word

The exchange?

Sorry for abusing the term.  I used "bubble" in the very broad sense of "fast price increase that starts and stops rather abruptly". 

Is "bull trap" appropriate, though?  The price was relatively flat at the top for about two months.  "Trap" suggests a move that quickly reverses, causing the traders who bought or sold late in the move to lose money.


The stabilization of the price at ~450$ from Apr/25 to May/19 must indeed have been due to absence of further bad news from the Chinese government, and to the "five exchanges" public pledge to make the game more friendly to small players.  But I don't see why the sudden rise after May 20 could have been due to that.

The May/2014 "bubble" was also very different from the typical bubble -- not an exponential that started off gradually and accelerated, but instead a steep linear rise, starting with no advance warning at all.  Looking closely, it was actually a series of concentrated buying episodes, each lasting only a couple of hours, separated by days of aimless (or downward) wandering.   

I explained earlier my theory about that "bubble", although I still cannot tell who those mystery buyers were.  I think (but with not much confidence) that those late-May buyers are still mostly holding; so that the -300$ drop after Aug/2014 is not due to to them, but is only a continuation of the drop from Feb to Apr, namely the Chinese speculators continuing to pull out.  (By the way, Bobby Lee of BTC-China claimed that the Huobi and OKCoin broke their pledge, some time after May.)

Ha I'm just busting your balls, man. As I said, I can't do that shit, either.

But the data is not really random, and some of the patterns do indeed repeat with some predictability. Some people trade 'at random', without any clue whatsoever. So what, this doesn't mean anything. If everybody is losing, who's winning?

The only thing that anyone sucks at here is basic math and statistics.

http://www.alphaarchitect.com/blog/2011/06/30/mission-impossible-beating-the-market-over-long-periods-of-time/

http://www.moneyshow.com/articles.asp?aid=No-Nonsense-32901

The number of expert stock traders who can consistently beat the market is statistically indistinguishable from zero. This result is only surprising because with the amount of blatant fraud on Wall Street you'd expect the cheaters to be able to muster more than 0.6%.

Stock trading is just gambling. Apparent skill at trading is an artifact of human brains seeing patterns in randomness that don't exist.

I don't think I suck, I think I was neither lucky nor unlucky. I came out where I started.

Point being, I consider it a gamble rather than a skill. (Yes there's skill involved, but short of having the ability to travel through time in a way that other people cannot, luck is the main factor in trading success for sure.)

A very disciplined, skillful trader might make a profit for sure, but a big move and some bad luck and it's over.