friday fumblings, page-100

Romaioi

Anniversary dates are just familiarity with history having lived through 30 years of trading and pouring over charts.

Cycles are of two kinds.

First type are those identified by others such as presidential and decennial and those of people like Armstrong and Benner etc.

The second type are those that can be identifird by a simple cycle tool.

In early days I identified them just by measuring with a ruler on hand drawn charts. I am not sure if all software has a cycle tool, which can be as complex as seaching for repetions on any basis or as crude as just trial and error of starting at a low and moving to another low and seeing if equal measurements keep hitting further lows.

I suppose a third type is Gann cycles such as 90 and 144 day blocks and increments and the subsets of 1/8th and 1/3rds etc.

I guess my answer is, no, I don't have any fancy software, although anyone with some programming skills could write their own without much trouble.

Cycles are strange animals as there seem to be solid ones and others that last a while and fade away.

Getting multiple cycles that trough together are a great thing. The more that trough together the greater the effect.

Leading into the 1987 crash I was tracking maybe 10 cycles with little benefit, so I stopped drawing them in.

After the crash I decided to write them in up to date and found every single one had a trough within one day of the crash low. Because I was hand drawing and hadn't propogated them forward I missed a magic opportunity.

Unfortunately, I don't think all cycles can be known and sometimes a larger unknown cycle can lessen or multiple an outcome.

For that reason, I regard cycle lows as something to look to come out of rather than go into as the best rule.

I would never place cyclical behaviour above the standard indicators. They give me a sense of coming market action but basic indicators must confirm.

In 1989 I wrote a guide for the markets for the next 15 years and looking at it not long ago I amazed myself by not only how accurate the turns were but how I even had the magnitude of the various up and down movements.

I don't suggest you even need that sort of information to trade successfully but I find it fun.