Short-term investing

Technical Analysis. Learn that or you'll get smeared as a short-term trader.

Toni Turner's books or StockCharts.com's Chart School is where I'd begin.

Also: start becoming acquainted w/ level two quotes.

If you give me your email address, I'll point you in the right direction.

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The only ways I know of to reliably make money in the financial markets require either enormous amounts of cash (i.e. you're running a billion dollar hedge fund and can move markets, hire a million-dollar analyst who actually does know what he's doing, etc.) or various illegal procedures (insider trading, pump and dump schemes, etc.)

There is no way for an individual to reliably make more money than a simple buy and hold. Including technical analysis schemes in there. They can be fun and are usually less expensive than any other form of gambling, but that's about it. If it were really that easy, all the mutual funds would be doing it already.

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This is completely incorrect. Daytrading, swing trading, position trading, long, short, there are plenty of ways for individuals to make money in the market. You just have to educate yourself before jumping in head first.

Technical analysis "schemes"?

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Daytrading, swing trading, position trading, long, short, there are plenty of ways for individuals to make money in the market. You just have to educate yourself before jumping in head first.

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Please - I have read and studied for several years about technical analysis, back when I was naive enough to think this had never occurred to anyone working on Wall Street as a way of making a little extra.

The problem is that it doesn't make any extra. It'll make some cash but then so will owning bonds. It loses a small amount compared with just buying and holding indexes. There are worse ways to spend time and money for entertainment, but that's about all that can be said for all these techniques.

It's possible to do better than buy and hold but you need to have several million invested in really fast software, hardware, data feeds and the people to maintain all that. That's what they typically do at a major hedge fund, which will not waste time on technical analysis techniques that have been touted for decades with no real success.

Think about it - anything that has been on the fringe for this long probably doesn't work as advertised.

Email sent.

I don't know TA outside of very basic stuff (and I don't trade), but I feel like if you're going to play the trading game (as opposed to buying and holding for an extended period of time), you need to recognize that, for the exact reasons you stated (IMO), a lot of TA basically becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, to some degree or another. This is my perception, at least.

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Open a Schwab IRA. You can invest in a PCRA (Personal Choice Retirement Account) which opens up the entire US market to you. Since it's an IRA, you don't pay any CG taxes on your profit each year.

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I did this and am quite happy with it.

1. TA as in basic charting tools. Patterns, trends, volume, ichimoku, candles, momentum indicators, leading indicators, lagging indicators, reversal indicators, fibs, you get the point.

2. I don't need to provide you with any sort of data set. There are plenty of individuals who make a fortune daily using nothing but technical analysis. To say that you can't make money doing so is not only wrong, but irresponsible advice to give a new investor. That's like saying YOU provide ME w/ a data set showing that TA doesn't work. You're not dumb enough to go through that trouble and neither am I.

3. I did not use the adjective "little" to describe the amount of education needed to become successful. However, I will say that even if you're buying the absolute best stock based on fundamentals and all you know about TA is to buy near support and not when the stock is overbought and posting a doji near resistance, then you're already making more money/saving yourself money, however you prefer to look at it.

4. TA is given more and more credibility on a daily basis. Find me a leading publication that doesn't recognize it (and your Buffett/Lynch books from the 80s don't count). Most Wall Street firms employ chartists now (and not to manage hedge funds either, but for your every day run-of-the-mill technical analyses on general market/individual security trends).

5. Say what you want, but to say it is impossible is naive maybe, but probably better characterized as extremely ignorant. Perhaps you just need to qualify your statement that "there is no way for an individual to reliably make money other than by using a buy and hold strategy", because that, my friend, is complete and utter bullshite and you know it.

Sent

The abstract to Number One seems to tilt in favor of technical trading strategies if anything:

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The purpose of this report is to review the evidence on the profitability of technical analysis. The empirical literature is categorized into two groups, "early" and "modern" studies, according to the characteristics of testing procedures. Early studies indicated that technical trading strategies were profitable in foreign exchange markets and futures markets, but not in stock markets before the 1980s. Modern studies indicated that technical trading strategies consistently generated economic profits in a variety of speculative markets at least until the early 1990s. Among a total of 92 modern studies, 58 studies found positive results regarding technical trading strategies, while 24 studies obtained negative results. Ten studies indicated mixed results. Despite the positive evidence on the profitability of technical trading strategies, it appears that most empirical studies are subject to various problems in their testing procedures, e.g., data snooping, ex post selection of trading rules or search technologies, and difficulties in estimation of risk and transaction costs. Future research must address these deficiencies in testing in order to provide conclusive evidence on the profitability of technical trading strategies.

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The abstract for Number Two is too long after all the reading I've already done today

We can debate market efficiency until the cows come home. All I know is that I know hundreds who successfully employ TA on a daily basis, and even if they're all full of it, I myself employ it with tremendous success. So even if I'm the only person on the planet who can "make significant money as an individual and without adhering in the majority of my plays to a buy-and-hold strategy", then I am perfectly fine with being that black sheep. And I say this with the utmost humility.

If you're not using TA when you're buying and selling stocks, then chances are you're paying too much on the front side of the transaction and not taking enough off the table on the back end.

As for transaction costs ... they're not even 1/10th of a single percent of my average investment amount. I mean seriously, you can find online brokers who charge less than 5 bucks a trade nowadays.

And one last thing, I employ a system I call Technimental Analysis as I only use TA after first filtering the security through my fundamental analysis. So FA tells me what to buy, and TA tells me when to buy and sell. And then, of course, QA also plays its role. But if I were only able to use one system, I'd take TA hands down any day of the week, especially considering its inherent ability to detect deteriorating fundamentals, albeit indirectly. The opposite can not be said for FA.

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especially considering its inherent ability to detect deteriorating fundamentals, albeit indirectly. The opposite can not be said for FA.

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Can you expand on that?