In trading, the past is where you go to test ideas. Studying past price data will reveal historical patterns and trends. You will see how the emotions of fear and greed can effect financial markets causing things to move far beyond what should be possible based on fundamentals. The past is a great place to see how the market reacts to popular technical indicators, support, resistance, and key moving averages. The past is also a great place to curve fit back tests until you find noise that you confuse for a signal. The more simple and the less degrees you use to find a trading signal the higher the probability that it is real and will work with out of sample data. Just because something happened in the past it is not an indication that it will repeat again it is only a possibility. The proper use of past price data is to see if you trading idea would have worked historically through mulitple types of different historical market environments. The past is a great place to get an good idea of possibilities and probabilities of your trading systems future success.
The present moment is the only place we can trade because we are not time travelers. In the present we take a robust signal, we set a stop loss, and we position size to avoid the risk of ruin. We don’t expose ourselves to too much open risk with multiple positions and are careful with having too much correlation between or positions.
The future does not exist. No trader or subscription service knows the future becasue they do not possess a crystal ball or a time machine. The future is where we will be stopped out, trail a winning trade, or exit a trade to lock in a profit. Since we do not know what is happening in the future we have trade based on the current price action and use our trading plan and react as time unfolds.
