I just launched on Saturday and have already had more than 10,000 trades "executed". Your comments are much appreciated. (Note: if you think reading stock charts is a bunch of crackpot hooey, feel free to flame.)
However, it might be an excellent tool to help technical analysts (gamblers) discover their own lack of skill.
I like your execution - it is indeed addictive.
Real statistical arbitrage firms, as I understand it, work by looking at the historical variation in thousands of asset prices at once, putting them into an enormous covariance matrix, and using dozens of very smart mathematicians and millions of CPU hours to figure out which assets are likely to be currently underpriced.
That's how folks like Renaissance Technologies got rich. Unfortunately, as soon as the secret got out, other folks started doing it as well, and pretty soon the mispricing of assets got smaller and smaller, so they're in an arms race to find more and more sophisticated algorithms.
So I guess the point is that if mispriced assets are that hard to find when you have a hundred PhDs and a supercomputer, you're not likely to do very well just by looking at whether a squiggly line is currently above or below its recent average. All the easy money has already been vacuumed up.
Even though 2 different charts look the same, the reasons may be different. One could be because a company is doing so well that they are constantly running out of stock (Nintendo) versus another company who's just had their 4th lead paint recall (Toy's R Us).