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I have recently visited a forex forum that I haven’t checked for a long time. The situation isn’t really any different. People are still asking about what to do on their position. Their fellows will respond with some ’smart’ advices.
One asked, “I have some Sell trades open a few weeks now since EUR/GBP took its damn rise. Anyone know if EUR/GBP is going to go back down anytime soon?”
And here’s several responses he got from fellow traders:
“I heard that it is going to stay around .7000 in an effort to teach people to use stop losses.”
Heard from where/who? LOL 
or watch this one: “it wont turning back….believe me”
Yeah, sure.. you’re having some insider info there? 
and this one is fun too: “Hold on to your shorts. It is going back to 6800.”
Hahaha..LOLL.. so inspiring. 
And there’s someone with a ‘more technical’ advice : “You are still inside .7 and .66 range, let’s see what happens next before you make another move.”
Alright.. Let’s wait and see forever and we can have beer while waiting for the margin call. 
And someone was responding with no better situation: “I’ve been frustrated with this pair on several trades and being range bound as folks have been saying makes it easy to think one has picked a top or bottom only to see it move in the wrong direction…”
He has several nice folks. 
Oh and this one too, a ‘more experienced’ one: “Right now the overall direction appears to be trending upwards ever so slowly!! What is the consensus on the pair breaking the .7028 top (of Sept 26th)? I’d like to see it get there as I think it might take off quite speedily after that …”
Allrite, how can I pay you for a complete daily analysis? 
Let me tell my view on the market. Regardless of the support/resistance lines we might have somewhere on the chart, or how the stochastic or MACD is pointing at, or the economic fundamental situation is, the pair have the same probability of going lower or not. I’ve seen so many times, any kind of trendlines or support lines or fibo lines have been broken, then all the technical traders/analysts will eventually find another technical explanation to describe the revealed situation. And even worse with the fundamental analysis mumbo jumbo.
A successful trader prefer to trade his well-developed strategy, and then to hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil.
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A conversation early this morning with one member of the Indotraders.
Trader: kalau tidak sibuk, saya mau tanya sedikit Pak mengenai COT (Common Of Trader)
Trader: apa Pak Darma tau mengenai COT ?
Trader: COT itu mengenai apa Pak ?
Darma: Commitment of Traders ya
Trader: iya
Darma: posisi net open di bursa, mas ya?
Darma: di bursa futures
Trader: saya tidak tau Pak mengenai COT
Trader: mau tanya mengenai COT itu dan apakah bermanfaat bagi trading kita?
Darma: tergantung time frame kita mungkin pak. dulu saya pernah coba perhatikan, karena ada beberapa teman traders yg mencoba menginterpretasi COT menjadi sentimen market
Darma: tapi kok rasanya gambyar dan tidak ada korelasi dengan market ya. terutama dengan market di time frame intraday.
Trader: apa berarti hanya bermanfaat di time frame D1 ke atas ?
Darma: sedangkan untuk timeframe long term, arah market dalam ekspektasi 2-3 bulan ke depan, saya sendiri lebih suka menggunakan pendekatan sistem aja. misalnya dulu pernah coba dengan sistem turtle atau aberration. fundamental ternyata nggak dipedulikan samasekali oleh market.
Darma: COT mungkin bermanfaat untuk mengantisipasi sentimen market untuk market yang likuiditasnya rendah
Darma: misalnya untuk saham di bursa jakarta. posisi net open para partisipan akan sangat mempengaruhi harga.
Darma: tapi kalau di market yg besar seperti spot fx, kayaknya gak pengaruh samasekali. karena data COT yang ada di bursa di NY atau Chicago, itu hanya sampel kecil dari market yang jauh lebih besar.
Trader: ok, terima kasih Pak Darma
Darma: iya, mas. sama2. itu pun hanya pendapat saya mas. belum tentu benar juga kok.
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Tentang COT dari salah satu halaman di website CFTC:
Commitments of Traders
The Commitments of Traders (COT) reports provide a breakdown of each Tuesday’s open interest for market reports in which 20 or more traders hold positions equal to or above the reporting levels established by the CFTC.
Reports are available in both a short and long format. The short report shows open interest separately by reportable and nonreportable positions. For reportable positions, additional data is provided for commercial and non-commercial holdings, spreading, changes from the previous report, percents of open interest by category, and numbers of traders.
The long report, in addition to the information in the short report, groups the data by crop year, where appropriate, and shows the concentration of positions held by the largest four and eight traders.
Supplemental reports show aggregate futures and option positions of Noncommercial, Commercial, and Index Traders in 12 selected agricultural commodities.
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Jokes on market analysts. It goes to both the technical and fundamental type of analysts:
A market analyst is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn’t happen today!
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Q: Why did God create market analysts ?
A: In order to make weather forecasters look good.
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The best time to buy anything is last year.
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The market is weird. Every time one guy sells, another one buys, and they both think they’re smart.
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I prefer a complete trading system rather than a complete analysis before each of my trades, especially that come from market analysts/gurus/experts.
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This week, we’ll explore several ideas on system development, particularly on the multiple entry and exit ideas that might be a powerful tool to be implemented into the currently used trading system. Not really a new one, actually. The technique has been implemented in several development project by several other fellow quantitative traders, but has never been used in a proper way, imho. Some robots with ‘grid’ approach are usually ignoring the most important thing in system development, which is the risk-management and risk-limiting function. I have seen many ‘grid’ system that perform well in all trades but then suddenly wipe out the account in a single occasion. It’s like having the lion in a well-built cage but the lock is unlocked.
And now, Aditya K, a fellow quants, he is a very young boy (but not as young as my fellow in the picture, lol), has shown me his trading performance using this technique in a counter-trend approach, which generally is ‘gridding’ a counter-trend trades off (a suspected to be) an exhaustion condition of a move on a short to mid term time frame. But it seems like he has never been exploring the use of some volatility-measurement tools and other essential filtering aspects which in my experience are very significant in improving the performance of systems.
Meanwhile, the currently used system, called the Ri-VER (ver vy.6c), has been performing well this month. Its been trading well on the accounts and made a 3% gain on them. I hope the market will provide us with another great months ahead. Yeah, good luck to us. 
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