[pillowkusis]

A site like this seems dangerous at best. Nobody can predict the stock market. Nobody can predict when a stock market is more likely to crash. This site tries to indicate otherwise. Whatever causes the crash it probably won't be one of the indicators listed here.

[choxi]

I think the subtitle sets expectations pretty clearly:

> No one knows for sure, but there are indicators that can help us guess. We can chart these indicators to give us the illusion of foresight.

[module0000]

Holy shit, just seeing the "indicators that can help us guess" gives me shivers. The person who utters that phrase is admitting to guessing with their money. Does anyone else find that as absurd as I find it? If I hire a pro to enter/exit a position, if they are guessing(with or without the assistance of indicators), I have made a very bad decision to hire them.

[MarkMc]

Perhaps you and I have different definitions of the a word 'guess'. To me, it includes 'Making a logical estimate based on available evidemce'. Every investment decision is a guess.

[pillowkusis]

>indicators that can help us guess

this is the dangerous part. No, they can't, even though it seems like they could. If they could, they would be used by people to make money and deflate the bubble that would have caused the crash in the first place. That's the theory, anyway

[module0000]

Predicting the actions of human being is very difficult. The market "crashes" when 2 people throw in the towel. One of those groups is the aggregate of retail+institutional buyers. The other group is market makers. When neither group is willing to bid the price, then that price decreases. When neither group is willing over an extended period of time(say, an hour), we have a "market crash". It's a very hyperbolic way of saying no one is willing to buy, but others are still willing to sell. In that state, the price retreats as buy-side liquidity is consumed, and continues retreating until buy-side liquidity is equal to sell volume. Once buy-side liquidity is in excess of sell volume, then the price moves up.

tldr; "crash" is used to describe a very natural condition, caused entirely by the emotions of human beings.

[TuringNYC]

The real problem with these sites is that it is super easy to overfit to historical data. Try enough indicators and enough parameters and you can fit historicals to the dot. Except, no one knows how the model performs on a go-forward basis. On Wall Street, these are often easy to debug -- you just run on live data, often with live trading to see if the signal is real. However, with economic data, the velocity of new data is too low to really test models on a go-forward basis...so you just have a theoretical model, likely overfit, that has little predictive value.