DB posted this in the SLAeyr thread. The red channel is the proper one as it is drawn real time and not after the fact. My question is - when does the channel get adjusted? What is considered to be a higher low and higher high on this chart?
The red channel is clearly broken. At what point is a new channel drawn starting from the low of May8th? Is it- May 9th?, May 10th? May 12th?
The chart was posted in the SLAyer thread because SLAyers will have read the book and, one hopes,
the Wyckoff material on which the SLA is based. If one has done neither, then he will be unacquainted with the protocols for drawing trendlines, trend channels, and determining overbought and oversold conditions. If he doesn't care about any of that, then there's no reason for him to plough through it. But the trader who wants to trade price successfully will want to understand all of this. He will, in fact, find it next to impossible to achieve success otherwise.
As regards this particular channel, it is of course not drawn in real time, however, when applying trendlines and channels to static charts the lines must be drawn
as if they were drawn in real time. Otherwise various biases come into play, particularly confirmation bias -- usually with the halo effect -- as well as anchoring. These biases make whatever one comes up with generally useless. Failure to read the chart from left to right compounds the error, a chief reason why the "backtesting" which so many beginners engage in yields disappointing results.
Therefore, one begins with the third week of April. Nothing beyond the third week of April has happened yet. The trader's attention is caught by the fact that price has made a lower swing high. He connects these two swing points with a line and draws a parallel line across the lowest intervening swing low,
as explained by Wyckoff. This gives him a measure of future overbought and oversold activity, i.e., if and when price breaks the channel to the upside or downside. This channel may last for years or it may last only hours. There was for example a lower high on the 17th, but a channel drawn using those swing points would have been broken quickly and has no relevance to the channel drawn next. There are then a number of trading opportunities following, some of which are reversals off the upper and lower limits of the channel and some of which are reversals off oversold and overbought conditions. If one doesn't know how to judge these conditions, he can use indicators, but indicators are not part of Wyckoff or of the SLA. An example from the Wyckoff thread can be found
here.
As for when to adjust the channel, this is not addressed in the pdf because the channel had only begun to alter its trajectory in mid-2013 and I completed that portion in January 2014. It is however addressed in the book. However, if one understands trend and
Wyckoff's views on trend, one can work this out for himself without too much effort, if he understands that the job of a trendline and a trend channel is to follow the trend. In the meantime, the NQ has returned to its original channel as shown
here. And if one always keeps the context of his efforts in mind, he will find it easier to stay on course and make the correct decisions, i.e., know what the weekly and daily trends are before assessing anything more immediate. Hourly trend channels are rarely of any value because they don't last long enough to provide the trader with sufficient notice of potential trading opportunities before they evaporate, whereas weekly channels will provide days if not weeks of notice, such as with
the reversal in early December.
I suggest that those who are interested in this sort of thing study
the Wyckoff thread. I have little to add to it, and it's all free.
Db