Real-time trend identification is vital to all traders. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to wait for two, three, or four touchpoints to develop so I can identify a trend or wait for a channel to triangle to completely form before I can begin to decide if the pattern is occurring in a sideways market. It takes too much time, we give up too much potential profit, we end up being among the last to the party, and worse still there is no definitive way we can say that the lines and levels we are watching are occurring in the correct market cycles. Those are the issues all traders deal with on a daily, if not hourly, basis.
The main issue is this: Before beginning any analysis we must identify the direction of the market. This is no small task to do in real time across multiple time frames. The Wave is the only tool I know of that can do this. Frankly, because most traders don’t know how or know of any tool to be able to confidently recognize a trend, they simply don’t discuss it and therefore apply their strategies somewhat randomly. Swing traders treat all markets as trending; momentum traders approach all markets as rangebound. You get the picture. If all you have is a hammer, the entire world is a nail.
