I don't know why I'm doing this, but I'll address this stuff once again.
A. Hypothesizing is not the same as floating around in an ether of abstractedness. See the Trading Journal thread below (I've lost count of how many times I've said that). Dithering about expectancy when one has yet to be able to locate any sort of pattern in a chart is, at best, irrelevant.
B. "Learning by example" does not occur without some sort of focus. If it did, everyone, given the hundreds of thousands of examples provided over decades, would have learned everything there is to learn. Sitting around like a passive vessel waiting to be filled is the most inefficient and generally ineffective form of learning.
C. The purpose of learning to evaluate what is in front of one is to be able to act on that evaluation in real time when one has developed a strategy and a trading plan. The obsessive focus on "what happens next" is distracting and irrelevant and has nothing to do with what is involved in developing a trading strategy.
D. Encouraging others to follow one's examples of trades and "follow the same route" is the exact opposite of what should be happening in the process of developing a trading strategy. Those who clamor for this are offended when someone says that they are doing no more than waiting around to be told what to do, but that is in fact what they are doing. As for posting yesterday's charts, I posted charts in real time for four days showing S/R levels in an effort to show how these are plotted throughout the trading day. Did anyone do anything with them? No.
E. One who's gone through the process of developing a consistently profitable trading strategy and posts that strategy does not encourage "the exchange of ideas" but rather a parasitic dependency that leaves the parasite in an aimless drift once the faucet is turned off. This is because those who clamor for the strategies of others have no interest in creating their own, or, at best, have no interest in making anything more than the minimum modifications in order to make somebody else's strategy work for them. Fortunately, they have a lot to choose from: Darvas, Schabacker, O'Neil, Elder, Ross, Wyckoff, Crabel, Landry, Raschke, Smith, etc etc etc.
For these reasons and others, I've stopped working with beginners on specifics unless they are willing to meet me halfway by opening up a journal. This alters the relationship more toward 50:50 and less toward 100:0. Has anyone been willing to do that? Yes. A few. And, except for those who balked at every request I made and dropped out almost before they started, they all benefited from the experience. But the vast majority aren't willing to make even that small step, and I can't think of any reason why I should give away my time to those who aren't willing to put forth even the slightest effort to learn how to trade.
Therefore, if after all the books and all the courses and all the seminars and all the websites and all the message boards one cannot yet detect a pattern on a chart, then he can begin with an off-the-shelf pattern, such as the Darvas Box, or the Cup With Handle, or one of many other such patterns. Then he can begin the attempt to locate this pattern in charts. If he cannot be bothered to do even that, then I can't think why I should waste my time nagging him to do so, unless for some reason I choose to adopt him.
There's one huge problem when starting out - deafness.
That's because 99% of newbies are deaf when they are told by genuine traders the real hard facts that they need to know about trading. First of all they put their hands up in horror, then they give a mouthful to the person who has told them, and then they firmly slap their hands over their ears so that they can't hear any more.
And then someone comes along who tells them all the sorts of things they want to hear. Wonderful cosy things such as how easy it all is, how it only takes a few hours to master the markets, how money just falls over itself to jump into their accounts, how special software will only select winning stocks, how a newsletter will reveal all the secrets, how there are secret formulae and secret pivot levels which are guaranteed to work, there's a guaranteed money-back offer, etc, etc. They are wooed by these softly spoken people and happily hand over thousands of pounds and wait eagerly with their wheelbarrows to cart off all the promised riches from the market. And they end up having to sell the wheelbarrow to get the bus fare for the trip home.
There are things newbies NEED to know, but these are never the things they WANT to know.
-- Skimbleshanks
