New traders often approach educational material with the attitude that if it’s free, it can’t be any good. They willingly pay thousands of dollars for courses and systems, and they are often disappointed.
Derivatives have grown from a relatively small market thirty years ago to the 800-pound financial gorilla in the world today. At over $600 trillion in notional value, it’s nearly ten-times the size of total annual world economic output.
There are times when the market is in such a strong trend that even Stevie Wonder could see which direction to trade. Currently, however, the markets area is acting like a conundrum wrapped in a riddle.
With limited test data, we can say that news matters in the short-term, but doesn’t generally have a long-term impact.
Over the years, analysts have spent countless hours looking for an edge in the markets. Much of that time has been devoted to finding new ways to measure momentum or find overbought/oversold extremes in the market.