A trend is a trend indeed truly your friend no matter the time involved One man's counter trend trade is another man's consolidation for that matter... All these statistics guys, eventually they are going to use some DSP thingy to identify the noise and subtract it out and then they will see the nature of the trend.. on whatever fractal level they focus on of course...
fractals have the same pattern when looked at at any magnification. i don't believe the same holds true for financial markets. a line on a stock for a 1 day period doesn't look the same as a line on a stock for a 5 year period. however i do agree that the markets do have a degree of irrationality in them no different then the people who make up the markets.
Ironically, the properties of fractal behavior imply quite the opposite. As to anyone interested in fractal education (not the maligned TA version), what better source than reading literature from the original source himself, b. mandelbrot. There are several easily accessible layman's books authored by mandelbrot; go pick them up and spend some time reading them.