The Future Is Now
The 21st-Century Technician
Expect the professional technician of the 21st century to acquire many of the attributes of the Wall Street technicians and traders from 100 years ago. Pattern recognition, intuition, judgment, and a feel for markets and people will become the distinguishing attributes that the technician may cultivate in order to secure an edge in 21st-century trading.
The theme of "pattern, intuition, judgment, and feel" may clash with the scientific information technology approach to technical analysis that is currently in vogue. But there are reasons to believe that a transition to a new paradigm for market analysis and action is under way. Anthony Tabell and Daniel Pink are on the forefront of those who believe this.
VIEWS OF TONY TABELL
During an address to the Society for the Investigation of Recurring Events (SIRE) in the early 1990s, Tony Tabell, a third-generation technician, concluded that with the arrival of new thinking on Wall Street (for example, the rise of behavioral finance and chaos theory), the technician of the new era will hearken back to the old-time technicians who worked on Wall Street in the early part of the 20th century. Tabell went on to define several important characteristics of the old-time technicians that can be used as instructive guides for today's professional technical analyst: intuitive, deterministic, contrary, apocalyptic (Figure 1).
FIGURE 1: THE MODERN TECHNICAL PRO. Here you see the skills and knowledge of the modern TA pro matched to the attributes of the old-time technician....Continued in the September issue of Technical Analysis of STOCKS & COMMODITIES
Excerpted from an article originally published in the September 2008 issue of Technical Analysis of STOCKS & COMMODITIES magazine. All rights reserved. © Copyright 2008, Technical Analysis, Inc.
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