I want to raise this question, and have everyone speak from their own experience or understanding.
Life is a puzzle. And the purpose of education, me thinks, which is never ending, is to understand the parts, the elements, the relationships, and lo, the true education is individual, albeit, our colleges and universities and elementary schools do provide us with some measure of faculty in the cognitive aspect
And trading’s education is Screen Time. It is that time spent testing and experimenting, in confusion and ever in play, endeavoring to grasp the relationships of each part.
Yes, it is a puzzle with everything, marriage, raising children, navigating the workplace. But when one finds an edge that increases one’s likelihood of favorable outcome, then one leans on that leverage, on that advantage, and proceeds to make their way in the world.
And perhaps in their later years sharing those and tips for how to navigate life, marriage, and whatever other endeavor that that individual has engaged in their life.
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[For us retailers], the steed of this Valley is pain; and if there be no pain this journey will never end.
(Baháʼu’lláh’s Valley of Love)
Games are won by players who focus on the playing field, not by those whose eyes are glued to the scoreboard. (Warren buffet)
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The market isn’t really a puzzle. A puzzle has stable rules, a correct answer, and the comforting idea that the pieces aren’t actively trying to confuse you. Markets are more like an evolving ecosystem of highly incentivized primates with trading terminals, all reacting to each other in real time.
People talk about “the market” like it’s a single intelligent thing. It’s not. It’s just the aggregate of millions of decisions constantly repricing risk, fear, greed, liquidity, expectations, and occasionally someone’s panic at 3am. Price moves for one simple reason: aggressive buyers and sellers collide with limited liquidity. If someone urgently wants in and there aren’t enough counterparties at that price, it moves until it finds them. Every candle is basically a receipt of that imbalance.
That’s also why most indicators eventually fail. They’re just derivatives of past price dressed up as foresight. A moving average crossover is, in plain English, “recent prices differ from older prices.” Useful observation… not exactly prophecy.
The funny part is even when something works, the market tends to neutralize it. Once enough people exploit an edge, it gets arbitraged away. It’s one of the few games where success actively destroys its own advantage.
If charts alone were enough, every quant fund would just hire a few interns and retire on a beach by Friday.
In the end, trading is less about predicting and more about surviving uncertainty. The market doesn’t pay you for being right, it pays you for managing risk while being less wrong than the next guy.
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The market is a puzzle, so your system needs stable rules, correct answers and not be confusing.
Your system should be an evolving ecosystem that produces a view that is as clear as possible reacting in real time.
Your system should be an intelligent combination of indicators that try to predict as accurate as possible the evolution of the price. It should not predict aggressive buyers and sellers, but it should know when liquidity will be limited and it should see, and quantify the impact on the price. The only thing that matters is PRICE. Your profits come from the difference between the buy and the sell (after expenses). So only price matters. If news has no impact on prices, the news is irrelevant. If news impacts the price, you will see in the price what to do. You never know in advance which news will change, and how much it will change the market. It can react by staying where it is, it can go up, or it can go down. The only way to have the correct answer is watching what the price is doing.
There is no single indicator that can predict the market. You need a system. A system uses several indicators (that should not be correlated). All these indicators together are the system. The only problem is to find the pattern as history keeps repeating itself. Past mass behavior creates (complex) patterns. The word “complex” is the reason why almost nobody finds these patterns. Over 90% of people don’t have the needed skills to find these patterns.
A good system is self adapting. It changes when strength of trends /market conditions change. So indicators should be flexible, and rules for indicators can change depending of information from other used indicators.
For instance: indicator A has four sets of rules. Which rule is activated depends on the value from indicator B. Indicator B has four different levels. Each level actives another set of rules for A. During a trade B switch into another level if market is changing. Which will change the rule to be used for indicator A. These switches can happen between frequent and not at all, depending on the market behavior/volatility.
That’s pure nonsense. I only use Open, High, Low and Close. And volume decides the size of the position, or even if I should trade or not at all at that moment. These are the only “ingredients” that I need.
It is all about predicting. If you have to survive uncertainty, you are on the wrong path. Trading is avoid uncertainty, or at least define, and control uncertainty. I always know what to do according to my system. If I don’t know it, I get out immediately. M
But predicting has a different meaning for different people. For me predicting means: finding the best entry and exit for the lowest risk possible. Here probabilities come in play. If you do enough trades, you can statistically calculate the probability of: entry, exit, size, risk.
Predicting to me is not “always be right”, but have results within the range of probability as calculated in my statistical tests. So I can predict in which range my results will fall with very high probability.
I think it is important to have an idea about the experience of the poster, so I share some information on what my experience is based on:
I started daytrading +25 years ago. At that time almost nobody knew what daytrading was (in my country). Internet did not exist at that time.
Passed at that time also my series 3 exam.
I spent in the beginning a few hours a day on learning to daytrade. The last 15 years I spent at least 12 hours a day on developing/improving/ rebuilding/ restarting from scratch…
I had a lot of ups-and-downs and also many AHA moments thinking I finally found/created the Holy grail. Most AHA moments ended eventually in a failure. If I would have started a dairy from the beginning, it would probably already have passed 1,000 pages, a long time ago.
I still remember that at times I would have signed for making 1 point net in the ES…If I would have seen at that time my actual results, I would never believe it. I would say that it is impossible. I now realize that something does not become impossible because most people don’t have the skills to do it. That’s how new things are invented all the time: the border of impossible is continuously moving further away. We see this in all areas.
You missed my point - even your own framing doesn’t actually support “the market is a puzzle.”
You say it needs stable rules, correct answers, and clarity. But in the same breath you describe a system that is adaptive, regime-dependent, and constantly changing how those “rules” apply based on other variables.
That already breaks the puzzle definition.
Price itself isn’t a signal that points to a hidden solution - it’s just the result of buyers and sellers interacting under changing liquidity. There’s nothing underneath it being “solved.” The market doesn’t generate a correct answer, it generates an outcome.
What you can do is read that outcome and build probabilistic bets around repeating behavioral patterns. But those patterns are conditional, not fixed laws - they exist only as long as the underlying behavior persists.
So even with OHLCV, rule systems, or adaptive logic, you’re not solving a puzzle. You’re interpreting a footprint of past interactions and positioning on the expectation that similar conditions may repeat.
I guess it all comes down to how you define a puzzle - but if the “rules” and “solution” keep changing based on participant behavior, it starts to look a lot less like a puzzle and a lot more like a moving system you adapt to rather than solve.
You clearly don’t understand how things work. Rules never change and solutions also never change. Rules are fixed (if not it would not be rules) and solutions are the result from applying rules on the market behavior (prices).
Example:
Indicator A: 4 rules
Indicator B: 3 rules
These rules never change, depending on which rule in A is valid, it initiates a rule for B. This link also never changes. So how these rules are applied is fix, so it is not like you say:
How those rules are applied is fix for each rule, so no constantly changing how rules apply.
One thing that I learned: never go into a discussion on any forum. It is in most cases a lost of time.
Especially if the discussion is about “what is the definition you use.”
The easiest way to see who is right is to compare trading results. But I am not interested in that for various reasons.
If you think you are smart, and I am dumb, so be it.
You’re acting like I randomly walked into a debate trying to prove you wrong, but the original thread was literally asking people whether they agree with “the market is a puzzle” or not.
I shared my opinion on that question.
You then chose to quote and directly respond to my post instead of simply posting your own standalone view in the thread. Which is completely fine - that’s how discussions work, but once you do that, you’re opening a discussion around the ideas being presented, including disagreement.
My point was never about whether a hypothetical adaptive rule-based system can exist. Of course it can. My point was specifically about the statement “the market is a puzzle.”
You keep moving the discussion from “what the market is” toward “how a trading system can be structured.” Those are not the same thing.
A system can have fixed internal rules. That doesn’t automatically mean the market itself behaves like a fixed puzzle with a stable solution underneath it.
There’s no need to turn this into “you think I’m dumb / you think you’re smart.” We’re just discussing different ways of conceptualizing markets in a thread that explicitly asked for people’s opinions on exactly that topic.
I posed this question to elicit the most diverse answers and approaches. From my point of view, it’s a puzzle, not for those of us who work in retail, but I’ve always asked myself: if I had billions or trillions, would I act the same way as a simple trader of 3 micro-contracts? And if I were a large fund, would I invest before important economic data? The same data that forms the central bank’s dot plot? That’s why the question is a puzzle; we are facing difficult times with these wars…
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In retail, even with artificial intelligence we can’t reproduce reliable results. I remember Jim Simons well; we’re not like him, and not even by using a Claude.ai or a chatlog platform could we surpass him. Even BlackRock, with all its resources, couldn’t develop a completely reliable algorithm. My point is, everyone expects economic and geopolitical data, but for example, when Trump says something unexpected, boom, the market goes to hell.
I like people who develop reasoning skills and have coherence, logically. I like haters, but they tire me quickly.
Sometimes the market makes absolutely no sense, like you’re putting together a 5000-piece jigsaw puzzle. Today, for example, according to the PPI data, it was down, I even went against my indicator and didn’t close the short position, and it all came back. It seems strange, weird, even I, who programmed it, find myself wondering if it really makes sense, I’m still human, lol 
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It happens when we build up results day after day in an account, and suddenly one very bad day comes and takes everything away from us.
Marcus, don’t try to be a know-it-all; everyone has their own understanding, and all perspectives are valid. I guarantee that anyone with a truly complete understanding isn’t even here—unless they just want to waste time. We are all simply sharing knowledge.
The title of this thread is “do you agree or not, and why?”
What I did was just sharing knowledge and opinion based on +25 years of daytrading.
As all perspectives are valid, according to you. Why do you see my vision then as a know-it-all?
Or are you the person who decides on this forum what is a “valid perspective” and what is not?
Loved this, reminded me of some jokes me and a friend have about trading, “we are 100% right 40% of the time,” “the best trade is the hindsight trade,” and one of my all time favortes, “login, mash a few buttons and see what happens”. 
I do agree that the market is a puzzle, however not a puzzle in the sense of “a box of 1000 pieces that get put together to make a picture”, I would compare it to a box of 10 puzzles of 1000 pieces each (some missing a handful of pieces) dumped into one single box and we have to put the pieces together the best we can in order to determine what the picture is, every day a scoop of puzzle pieces is taken out of the box and replaced with a new scoop of pieces and the box is shaken up.
Always changing, always different, you get a good base idea of what the picture is and grind away putting pieces together the best you can. An ever changing puzzle we are trying to put together that we know what it looks like, but the pieces are difficult to fit on a constant basis.
I don’t think the market is a “puzzle” in the sense that there’s some hidden final answer to solve.
From a Zamora Bias / market structure perspective, the market is more of a participation environment than a puzzle.
A puzzle implies:
- there is a correct answer,
- the pieces eventually fit together,
- and once solved, uncertainty disappears.
But markets don’t work that way.
The market is constantly transitioning between:
- expansion,
- rotation,
- imbalance,
- absorption,
- liquidity seeking,
- and participation shifts.
What most traders struggle with is trying to force certainty onto an environment that is probabilistic and adaptive.
This is why many traders:
- overtrade,
- chase indicators,
- force entries,
- or believe every move “means something.”
In reality, a large part of professional trading is learning:
- when participation is aligned,
- when structure supports continuation,
- and when the market is simply noisy or rotational.
The Zamora Bias framework was built around this exact concept:
Context Before Execution.
Meaning:
before asking “Should I enter?”
the better question is:
“What type of environment am I participating in right now?”
Once you stop treating the market like a puzzle to solve and start treating it like an environment to read, trading becomes calmer and far more structured.
You stop trying to predict every move.
You start managing participation quality instead.
That shift alone changes almost everything.
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It took me more than a decade to find out myself, understand, and apply that successfully. The huge majority of people who are interested in trading, will never know about the existence or importance of it, and most of those who do understand, will also never be able to apply it successfully.