Am I paraphrasing you correctly? The cheetah is your analogy for position trading and the sparrow is your analogy for day trading. The common denominator is that both animals wait for can't-lose circumstances. Exactly.
How do you pick your trades? I use many different types of technical input: charts, Elliott Wave and Gann analysis, Fibonacci numbers,
cycles, sentiment, moving averages, and various oscillators. People think that technical analysis is unreliable because
they tend to pick the one thing they are comfortable with. The problem is that no single technical approach works all
the time. You have to know when to use each method.
How do you do that? It is experience and gut feel. I use all forms of technical analysis, but interpret them through gut feel. I do not
believe in mathematical systems that always approach markets in the same way. Using myself as the "system," I
constantly change the input to achieve the same output—profit!
Is there anything you can single out as the most important element in deciding to put on a trade? I am always looking for a market that is losing momentum, and then go the other way.
Having traded both the stock and commodity markets, would you say they behave differently? Absolutely. In contrast to the commodity markets, the stock market very rarely gives you the opportunity to
enjoy a meaningful trend.
Why is that? Because when institutions and specialists sell out, they don't sell out at one price level, they scale out as the
market goes up. Similarly, when they buy, they scale in as the market goes down. This leads to choppier price action
and is the reason why many good commodity traders that I know lose every time they go into the stock market.
But you win consistently in the stock market, as well. What are you doing differently? I don't try to figure out where the market is going before the action; I let the market tell me where it is going.
Also, there is such a variety of technical input in the stock market (divergence, advance/decline, sentiment, put/call
ratios, and so on), that you will almost always get a signal before the market is about to do something.
