Alaric wrote:TheMotorcycleBoy wrote:I don't see any weakness in a bit of analysis, mind you. For instance, conclusions about currency fluctuations or market certainty as G and SH refer. Knowledge is power, is it not?
I would have thought if you had reliable insider knowledge, that would be worth a fortune. It's also illegal, but trying to spot what others may have missed isn't. The problem perhaps is that Companies are more likely to hide away bad news than good news, so if shares are incorrectly valued it can often be that they are too high.
I'm inclined to think that markets as a whole can move in a semi random manner, but not individual sectors or companies within it. I doubt the statistical hypothesis that today's price change was independent to yesterday's would stand up.
Hi Alaric,
You missed my point, which was a reply to pyad, in that I don't see the action of trying to analyse a few days worth of price movement as a weakness.
Perhaps as a private small timer, attempting to follow it would be an act of madness, but that's an aside. So agreed, I've been in this game for a far shorter time than most of you lot (pyad, G, SH, etc), but what I've learnt is that big instis and brokers etc. play in the market in the long and short term and presumably hour to hour, day to day
must try to make money doing so.
There is (in my naive view) a lot going on behind the scenes which effects short term price moves. For instance does not the LSE hold auctions 3 times a day for the purpose of price setting? Presumably a lot of the bigger players in the game are fed clues, hints, instructions from "sell side analysts" (am I right? is that the correct terminology?). So although in the long term the day to day price moves are irrelevant, presumably they make a difference to these instis and brokers, else they wouldn't have so much money behind these auctions, trades and salaries going to analysts etc.
Hence my earlier point, in which from a personal perspective I do not see my own, for example, analysis of such happenings as a weakness. If it helps me understand what's happening underneath, and helps to differentiate between signal and noise then it seems that it must be a strength.
Matt