Trader’s Narrative

I adore simple things. I’m a “simpleton”. There’s an elegance in simplicity that I find difficult to fathom. Paradoxically, simplicity isn’t simple at all. When you see something simple, beautiful… it is because everything “not beautiful” isn’t there.

There’s that old story of the sculptor saying that he didn’t carve a masterpiece but only chipped away what shouldn’t have been there. The next time you see something that is easy to use, delightful, simple, beautiful to look at, remember that a lot of thought and wisdom went into making it so. In contrast, it is very easy to make complex and convoluted things. No thought, no intelligence is really required.

This week I’ve been re-reading Curtis Faith’s “Way of the Turtle” when I came to this part:

One sure sign of a Pseudo-expert is writing that is unclear and difficult to follow. Unclear writing comes from unclear thinking. A true expert will be able to explain complicated ideas in ways that are clear and easy to understand.

That made me think of one person: Jack Hershey.

If you’ve been on any sort of trading messageboard long enough, either he or his incomprehensible system will pop up eventually. Some think it is the key to the market. He certainly claims mastery - although he has provided nary a shred of evidence.

From what I understand (I’ve lost way too many brain cells trying to decipher his gobble-digook) his futures trading method calls for you to always be in the market, either long or short. And he claims he can consistently capture 3 times the intraday ATR. Oh and then there’s the little matter of never losing. Seriously. I’m not making this up.

Hershey has been asked, and even begged, to go into any chat room and do a live trading session. He has consistently refused. Instead he continued to make grandiose claims and litter boards with his writing. And it is the most muddled jumble I’ve ever seen. Words (he loves to use Gaussian in every other sentence), made up words, acronyms, etc. all smashed together into a mash of goop.

Some actually fall into the trap of believing that since it looks incomprehensible and complex it must have value. They think, ‘It must be an amazing system, because I have no idea what he just said!’

I’ll never forget the time a few years ago that I found him on a thread of mine on elitetrader. I decided to respond in his “language”. I wrote a bunch of nonsensical words, phrases and threw in a few Gaussians, and voila! He replied positively. I couldn’t stop laughing for the next hour or so due to a very bad case of the giggles.

It would help win me over if Jack made some sense. Instead he says things like “volume fine sweeping” and claims that the YM is a bigger market than ES. It would definitely help if he actually demonstrated his method via live trading for one day. I’m sure the whole trading world would like to see him extract 3 times intraday ATR, always being long or short. Without a loss.

But I’m not holding my breath.

I’ll stick to simple.

Sometimes you don’t need the AAII, II or other standardized measures of sentiment. Take a look at the screencap from Digg It is a blog post which bounced from a personal blog to Seeking Alpha and from there to Yahoo News. Then someone put it on Digg and it got 1044 diggs!

One thousand forty four. That’s a very high number of diggs, especially for a topic which falls waaay outside the normal Digg user interests: gadgets, software, technology, politics, video games, videos of monkeys in zoos, etc.

Think about this. What portent do you think it has? What kind of knowledge, market expertise and experience does the average Digg user have? are they being driven by emotion? or a cold, calculating mind? when lemmings are beaten so easily into a frenzy like this, are we at the precipice about to fall off or are we near the bottom?

Think about it and come to your own conclusions. I’ll revisit this in a few months (unless we are all hoboes panhandling at a corner).

I haven’t revealed the identity of the blogger to protect the guilty and because I was taught to not say anything if you can’t say anything nice (which would also explain why you won’t read anything about Jack Hershey here… oy vey).