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Comment by georgeglue1 | Hacker News Reader

Can someone summarize the returns and risk-level of his strategy?

Trying to trade purely off technical analysis is a disaster waiting to happen. Have a look at the technical analysis of ETH/USD, for instance, they have absolutely no clue what's going on:

https://www.ethnews.com/analysis/10-30-2017-ethereum-forecas...

As to the linked article, the idea of SMA crossovers is nothing special: https://www.babypips.com/learn/forex/moving-average-crossove...

Take a look at their example. Say you sold at the peak, great. Then the currency drops and you buy at the bottom, great. But then the SMA crosses again and you sell - oops, look where the graph is going. You can't predict this stuff with technical indicators.

My opinion is that technical indicators can work well... when it's clearly a bull market (but then, so can every other strategy). They absolutely suck and can't predict when it's clearly going to crash. Which make technical indicators pretty much useless because you can easily lose all your gains when that happens.

> Trying to trade purely off technical analysis is a disaster waiting to happen.

Watching purely a leading indicator can get you in trouble with false positives; while a lagging one means missing some of the trend. Yes, you can take it too far, use too many indicators, or look for trends in ranging markets and other mistakes.

That ethnews article is bizarre

For this kind of simple SMA/EMA crossing strategies there is essentially only one tunable knob (minimum return on one trade pair) that controls both return and risk and main output of this kind of analysis is finding out setting of that knob which you are comfortable with.

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