You bet. And I encourage those who like to trade short on the way up to continue to do so. After all, that helps price to reach its upside target.
[quote I am so glad I'm not as smart as most here think themselves to be, and that I have the good sense to know it. You see, when you are uneducated and come to something you new to you, you know you are uneducated. So, wanting to learn, you pay attention.[/quote] At the peak of the internet bubble it were doctors, lawyers and engineers that quit their dayjob to have a shot at trading. Nowadays it's the uneducated that think trading will make them millionaires. I don't know what is more sad, the fact that they are conned into believing in this pipe dream or the disconnect between their actual abilities and their expectations.
One of the largest traders in the world, with multiple phd's (physics, math, economics) uses straight lines to give context to his trades. Albeit, differently than Wyckoff, they are still straight lines. And his mentor, a phd who used straight lines...
If by "pipe dream" you mean the idea that trading will make one a millionaire without understand how the market works and how and why price moves as it does, I agree. One has at least to understand, again, that price has two states available to it: trending and ranging. If he doesn't know what that means or how to distinguish one from the other, much less how to put that knowledge to profitable use, then he will fail. If one cannot see a stride here, lines or no lines, he needs to explore scalping strategies:
Since you're the expert here on market mechanics, how much study is required to achieve this insight and what kind of intellectual qualities needs the student to posses? Is this achievable for an uneducated person like a high-school dropout?
problem here is the school drop-out is already damaged psychologically. What you want is a healthy high-school leaver.
The snark aside, one ought to be able to "get it" in six months. If he doesn't, he should pursue some other route. Intellectual qualities? Open-mindedness in general, an understanding of human behavior, specifically what prompts people to buy and sell, more specifically what ignites greed and fear. As to the last, I have not found a better resource than Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.