These definitions are for people who don’t trade that try to sound smart at cocktail parties. If you were shorting stocks from 12000 to 14000 in the DOW and lost everything you owned would it be any comfort that some geek economist who never made a dime trading told you it was a secular bear market?

Is the trend up or down, if it is up buy if it is down sell, this kicking sand back and forth in the sandbox over these definitions is a waste of time.

Also the comment about the top double breakdown retracing to the prior recent breakout point being a 75% accurate pattern is absolute hogwash. Where do people come up with this kind of thing? That just could not be more subjective. Under what parameters would that be? I can tell people who read in here that I have studied or developed myself hundreds of systems and it is very difficult to get a general pattern like that to a level of accuracy anywhere near that without curve fitting data so much that it guarantees failure in real time. A specific example is the trading system I used to get that third place finish in the Robbins contest two years ago that many people in here were aware of. It traded with 80% accuracy for 3 years, now it does not work at all. This is typical for patterns. To point out a breakdown from a double top as that likely to retrace to that level is just absurd. I would be willing to bet that if you looked at all the double tops that broke the shoulder line, less than half of them retraced to that level that was stated in that post unless of course your timeline was 50 years on the trade.

The only patterns that are that accurate in the markets are those defined with several variables and even then most if not all fail to deliver that level of accuracy in real time trading.

I should just bite my tongue and usually do when I read this stuff in here and other places, but I do feel compelled at times to try and help people who do not live in this world of trading, from being misguided by this kind of chatter.