The one surefire way you can become the best you can be - they way you become great - is to focus on Rules not Patterns
Head and shoulders patterns are not carved in stone. They look recognizable but must be interpreted. Like the Chinese language, there are more than a dozen dialects to this pattern.
Humans like us are bad at estimation and prediction. Read Phil Tetlock.
For every well-known “chartist” there are 25,000 guys who tried the same and blew up or didn’t make it. It's also emotionally and mentally draining to have to replicated each day.
Recognizing a chart patterns are no different to me than recognizing an odd number from an even number. What do you do with it? What’s the context of the information?
When I moved to LA from Manhattan, we all got a book of street maps called the Thomas Guide. It’s a spiral bound book of maps that we all kept in our cars. GPS was not included in smart phone plans and you had to get it separately, but it was expensive.
If you don’t know where you are going, having a Thomas Guide in your car is not going to help you. It will help you get wherever you want to go, but you need to come up with the destination. Same with trading. You need to know when to enter and exit and how much to own (or how fast to drive).
If you “recognize” a pattern, you don’t know where to enter, exit, or position size. That’s why I don’t consider charting as a long-term methodology to trading for the majority of aspiring traders.
Whereas a certain chart pattern might appear bullish, you know you're bullish when you have an order in to buy an N-Day high and that the expected value of that trade is 4 times your risk unit - regardless of the pattern. Trading rules supersede all chart patterns and remove the paralysis from analysis, the interpretation, and the uncertainty that comes from not having a decisive plan.
In fact, the way most good traders become “great” or even just better, it’s by letting go of charts and focusing on process and trading rules that are not derived from chart patterns.
Go from good trading to great trading.
