01 March 2013

Utility in Markets

What one may seek from forex is the capacity to have that level of logical causality one gets from equity analysis. That is, one has to work hard to compare structured data across many examples, to find potential companies to grow, but it is for some perhaps mainly that, hard work.

One can spend significant amounts of time in forex, for arguably less effective results, yet still and interestingly appreciating the nature of this market, and what it says about the nature of markets. And to try and approach the answer to...what it may say.

The problem with intuitive trading is that it takes a human mind and a human mind is prone to using ways of reasoning not suited to the task at hand. For example being aggressive in a forex trade can be negative, for you are fighting something that is not fighting you, in fact it is normally a battle between vast sums of money and exquisitely sensitive computer programs. It is like punching the air at the side of a boxing ring. What effect will that have on the action inside...

This suggests the utility of going with the market (simulating going inside). That is one waits for a moment of action that may suit one's constraints. That is one regards a lot of the action as no one's land. Let us then conjecture the market as having a certain function that may be useful.

If we regard the usual function of this market as direction -> reverse -> instability, then we could regard decay as the fading of this function. We see the asymmetry in the determinism of direction -> reverse. That is fading needs to be expressed in the reversal, as stability is itself then a function of the prevailing direction. However we can note that each moment is a function of many such determinism. Which one wins, is this a random event (those spinning dice). Who wins may have bearing on the time taken for the next finding of stability, rather then the direction.

However there is instability and there is oscillation. Oscillation may be a necessary function of stability. Hence the market in general moves all over the place, at least at some level of detail. Then it may get patched onto an equity trend. This can then lead into structured trend ends. These may not reverse.

Why, because they may bounce off the structure, that is the primary, temporally extended function of reference comes into play. Temporal extension nullifies the time to stability. But note if the trend is held within a range of the pair, that is, it is weak, the pair can range back down, but perhaps in a weakly influenced way. But one might note that what traders are trying to do, their battle with market structure can punch through all this. But it seems, and one may expect then, that this may not necessarily prevail, unlike equities, in some circumstances.

We then try and use this to catch a pattern trade. What we are doing here is not trying to emulate computers or go with money flow, but see patterns on patterns and prune patterns thus. This kind of reasoning may be what intuitive reasoning is all about, to an extent. Can one do this with equities, well does one need to. One might suggest that they behave like this in extended states. That is the time factor is more reliable. And one might suggest that at least with some pairs there is pattern-pattern stability over time.

A problem with all this is the limits of simulation. We can see this as creating a disjoint between patterns on patterns. One might ask if equities have reduced that shadow effect which makes for the need for simulation, by their hard wiring in company growth. One might ask if this gets lost for a time though, in some circumstances. One could ask what does it take for it to find it again. That growth is always there, but does it need a market which is already responsive to it and can that responsiveness emerge. This touches on the time issue again. That is, we may expect it to, unless that is significantly impaired.