Rowingboat, I just latched on to your fractal analysis post on this thread, thanks. Gee mate, I dont know about this kind of analysis. I dont know much about fractal analysis in the context of finance, but remember those computational fluid dynamics days when we played with similar modelling techniques for modelling turbulence? The very same techniques that some of our more enterprising bretheren transferred over to the world of finance as variants of the Black & Scholes equation, and tarted it up as 'financial engineering'?
In short, I have suspicions of models that make assumptions about collective trading behaviour (I assume fractal analysis is doing that). It may work well for the NASDAQ which is traded by enough traders so that its behaviour acts - as a whole - like a homogeneous 'fluid'. The gold market looks very much like a market that is NOT homogeneous, that is, there are some large lurking sharks (eg; JPM) that dont play by silly model rules and can destroy model behaviour in an instant.
