Hahahahaha! Many times have I had similar conversations with my coder, Joe Doaks. Eventually he built up tens of thousands of lines of code quantifying all of my delusions. Occasionally I will rag his old ass by asking something like "Would you please hack me out code taking a long at the open on a Wednesday following a Tuesday which fell in the second week of the month when the previous month ended on a Monday?"
He is a flatulent freeloading fraud, like me. But you are right that he is an Aristotelian. He never lets facts get in the way of his theorizing.
Here I place A and C to set up the retrace condition of path 1. you also see another half of a normal display chart has appeared. Enjoy.
To cover the other location set of A and C. See the attached chart. Time moves from left to right in all panes as usual. One thing is for sure. All the points HAVE occurred prior to the OP's dilemma. The panel below the price chart could have also been running if the trader so chose. this means for the OP to move forward in his learning he has to note, from Path 2, just when he gets emotional signals. They have been arriving simply because he is sensing a chart and does not have any inference from his long term memory to add to the visual sense to get to have any PERCEPTION.
The next four charts will fill in some additiional history known to market watchers at the time of the OP's quandry. chart 2 with trend lines and chart 3 with trend lines opens up the inference (posible long trem memory) available to all traders. Annotating trends is what adds this inference. It is now easy to see the difference between a retrace and a reversal.
chart 3 with trend lines. I have to space out these charts since ET have a spacing between posts requirement.
Next I add the available volume history. you can see a succession of illustrations where ony the context by Nodoji and the OP began the illustrations. In modelling or coding or programming this is called adding "degrees of freedom". this term, degrees of freedom, is an information connotation. Raw data flows in a time sequence and information is "added" to the raw data by a method known as data processing. A sum is a degree of freedom. Sums have parts and often the parts comes one after another until a time is reached when they all have arrivied. In formal schooling this matter is handled by children who are quite young. In trading, it is about the same difficulty and learning to do sums. A child, in learning addition, quickly learns when it is the time to take a sum in a word problem. The punctuation and connectives tell her from her long term memory once she has the long term memory. that is the essence of the OP's dilemma and quandry he implies to us here in ET.
Last chart for bringing us up to date within the two matters the OP brought up. We know there are three matters but he has not reached the market sensitivity to even see the third one, so far in his career. It would be a good idea in the next few illustrations to "ADD" all the context possible. 50 successive illustrations would cover it. By doing these we could create logs for the two distincymarket conditions: retrace andreversals. Each is ID'ed immediately as they commence.
Well good I've slowed down to the pace of the ET delivery system. wouldn't it be neat if ET had a provision for calling markets on an expert level in real time. If you undertand how to monitor anf analyze trends as they form, then you can log the events and annotate the V and P charts. A retrace begins @ point 2 and is going to point 3. Knowing this, you can assure yourself how to take theretace prfit segment and begin to take the next profit segment in to the future. I will go into the future later; but first lets get rid of ALL and I mean ALL of the subjunctive overlays preventing the OP from getting out of beginner level. The illustration is the REVERSAL possibility. The Present is where the OP is.