Thank you for your kind comments Charlton. Your understanding of the situation is typically acute and correct.
If one can truly understand context and motive then price action often gives massive clues as to the nature of the next move. Useful footsteps are continually imprinted in the soil of price action and if one has the skill to understand what they mean, in different situations, then a sharp edge may present itself. At this level of proficiency you can defenestrate your systems, statistics, historical quant analysis and implied volatilities and simply wait for the market to present a near perfect opportunity then cash in with pinpoint accuracy. This cannot, as Socrates said, be mechanised as each moment in the market is paradoxically unique yet still conforms to a sort of blueprint to those that can read it.
Reducing the market to a series of equations or implied statistical probabilities may give you a reasonable edge and consistent profitability (if so, that's wonderful - I'm not knocking it for a second - damn it you're ahead of the 90% or whatever) but it is surely ultimately more rewarding to look directly inside the market as opposed to reading it in fuzzy translation. It is an organic, artistic approach that scientists, engineers and mathematicians may find hard to swallow as they are too busy running numbers through fixed filters, their brains trained and almost hard-wired to a certain way of thinking that serves them marvellously in other disciplines but only imperfectly in the market.
Socrates has mentioned "visual mathematics" before and perhaps that describes the meeting of past and present transactions, eye, brain, calculations, adaptation, empathy, art, science and strategy rather well, though it is a modus operandi far above where I am and probably ever will be, though fwiw I've got a bit of a handle on exhaustion (LOL ... only 7497 pieces to go). Perhaps if we understood the workings of the human brain in more depth then these mental calculations could be broken down into something a computer could deal with effectively, but at the moment there is still a divide, such as the one that prevents AI robots from being convincingly human. Like you said Charlton we use wider stops because even when we have a pretty good idea of direction our accuracy and skill are not sufficient to plunge in with almost total certainty that a 4 pip stop will not be in danger for a second. For this reason (my obvious lack of proficency) my attempt to explain is excessively vague, frustrating (to me, too) and misguided, but I hope that there is something worthwhile in the essence. Of course one will rarely hear how people learn to do this as we are, unfortunately, the enemy and also it is probably impossible to explain mechanically. But seeds are sometimes planted by the generous - it is up to us to do the thinking.
Incidentally if someone had claimed the above was possible to me a year or too ago I would have dismissed it as fantasy, but having seen a lot of evidence in support of it my view has changed considerably. Even the pathetic development of my ability has allowed me to cut stops down to a third of what they used to be and this is encouraging. Now just the small matter of fully letting go and truly seeing, not just looking.
Regarding the roulette wheel I think machines have been invented that view the wheel and run a lot of Newtonian physics / chaos calculations to predict where the ball will end up. There is another thread mentioning this somewhere. I believe they have been shown to offer a small edge (obviously not accurate every time) since once can bet while the wheel is spinning (before being hauled out of the casino by large men)
. There's lots about this on Google, though most of it seems to be the usual charlatans flogging rehashed ineffective versions. Food for thought anyway.
