That's....not true at all. Read some books on investing and trading. I have. Read The Complete Turtle Trader, about how Richard Dennis took 23 screened (for intelligence) but not financial-industry people off the street and made them into successful traders with a simple set of rules. Read about the Market Wizards, a series of books by Jack Schwager where he interviews a bunch of traders. They all have a system. Some reveal it, some don't. Some work on technicals, some on fundamentals (the guy I read about last night before going to sleep, he largely uses EPS figures, being that EPS has increased over the past 5 years and the last two quarters have been growing YOY more than the last 5 year growth rate).
Trading and investing are as much an art as they are a science. Most of the traders lost money in their first years, but then figured it out. They lost tens of thousands in loans from their parents. They worked and saved every year and then lost it. Then one day the corner turned.
Ask your friends on the KTCC message board what their systems are. Without apparently realizing it, you have one. It's apparently based on fundamentals (trailing revenue, EPS, balance sheet) and technicals (price and volume chart).
There are several types of people. Investors, who invest for years and years in the same company, ride its ups and downs and years of stagnation but maybe collect dividends. There are medium term traders, who hold for months, maybe a year. They're trying to catch a company's momentum in a hot industry or with a hot product. Then there's short term traders, who trade over days or weeks. This is when the market changes. Over the short term, fundamentals don't matter. Does a company change in two months? No. What they're trying to catch is a change in investor sentiment. The company doesn't matter. They're playing market psychology. What will everybody else do? How will they react to this potential news coming up? Is money flowing in one direction or another?
