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Strategies & Market Trends : Systems, Strategies and Resources for Trading Futures -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Patrick Slevin who wrote (17309)	3/2/1999 8:33:00 PM
From: SE	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 44573

No, I don't recall. The other day when you told me about double tops I was surprised at the simplicity of your statement and why I had not realized the same thing. If I may paraphrase, you stated something like double tops and double bottoms are a fiction. I can show you numerous charts that include double tops and double bottoms to "prove" to you of their significance. However, in between all the double tops and double bottoms are numerous places where there could have been a double top or double bottom, but I will never point those out to you because they failed to come to fruition. It is a formation that hindsight lends credibility to. I wonder about triple bottoms or tops as well. Yes, you already have two tests of a level, but once again you cannot be sure of the action until after the fact. I am sure E&M has a nice chapter on the formation, but I question its usefulness in real time action. In fact, I actually am beginning to think that way about many of the traditional TA methods. Don't take this as a knock against TA, but I have seen watching real time many times when the MACD crossed the zero line or had a crossover with a nice bullish/bearish divergence and because the price action did not hold, the chart action after the time frame was completed (1 minute bars, 5 minute whatever) was no longer present. It lends credence to the fact that these types of actions look plain as day after the fact, but during the action when it matters most....you cannot trade off of it. It simply does not form properly until the move is already underway. Heck, you want an obvious one...right now put up an SPX daily with a standard 12,26,9 MACD. We have a very clear bearish divergence. If this was so simple, we should just short it here and forget about it. It has to go down. It has to. So why isn't the world screaming short. It is right there before our eyes? The bullish divergence off the bottom was a beauty as well, but I don't recall and lot of discussion about it at that time...... Something to think on I guess.