A lot of statements you made. This is my opinion: Certainty or uncertainty are linked with the people that are trading, they are the market. Traders should try to understand the markets. It is all about knowledge. 100 years ago weather men were not able to predict the weather for the next week. Lots of uncertainties. Nowadays they can with fairly high accuracy (at least were I live). Did the weather change? No, the knowledge of the weather men changed. They recognize now patterns that can be used. The same applies to traders. It is strange that you speak about certainty while you use things that 70-80% of the time don’t work??? If you want certainty why do you use things that with almost certainty will never make money for over 50% of times (your 70-80%) ? To me that’s contradicting behavior. Makes me think about self destructing behavior. We work indeed with probabilities. But there is a huge difference between a probability of 25% and one of 85%. They are both called probability but they are completely different. I am only interested in high probability. If you can find something with high probability you can box it in as a good signal. If you need certainty you should immediately stop trading because the only certainty we have is death. Trends are alike as they always go thru the same different phases. Only the range is different, but should be calculated and this will increase again the probability. A good trader is somebody who can manage the uncertainty very well with high probability. I started to trade in th early 90’s and in the first year wiped out (in less than 24 hours) and got also 1 margin call. Since then I NEVER got any margin call again. I learned how to manage the uncertainty very well with high probability. Over the years my losses became smaller and smaller. Now, my losses (money that I give back after first making it) represent less than 10% of the profits made in my winning trades over any 1 year continuous period for the last 10 years. I don’t use P.A. nor B.O. so your statement is in best case only important for a (small?) group of people. This leads to the fact that your conclusions might also only be valid for a (small?) group of people. I say "might" because it is even not sure. You don’t have to eliminate uncertainty, you have to reduce it to the minimum. And the edge will not slightly but can even HUGELY increase. I know this from personal experience and see the confirmation on an almost daily basis, over and over again. BTW good signals don't exist, there are only signals. You have to take all of them even if they will end in a loss. They are part of the game. That’s for 100% true, but irrelevant. If you want a system that is 100% sure you should stop trading as I mentioned before. You should do all you can to increase the probability and push it as close as possible to certainty. I make losses, so that confirms to me that nothing works all the time. But that is not necessary at all. The "system" should always work.
In technical analysis, trader can find several tools that can help him/her to gage when the trend starts and ends. The simplest of these tools and the most promising of them all, are the Simple Moving Averages. If you are a day trader then you want to use the short period moving averages. On the other hand, if you are an investor then you want to use the long period moving averages. Remember to keep it simple!
@Mtrader I think you do not understand what i am saying. B.O. of ranges fail 70% to 80% of the time hence you DO NOT TRADE THEM. You FADE them. Eventually, one B.O. will succeed. You watch the first P.B. Of a potential successful B.o. If it doesn't trade back up into the range ( i.e. the a bottom of range where the B.O. OCCURED Or back down into the range for a top of the range b.o) THEN you may look at going long if b.o. occured at the top or shorting if b.o. was at the bottom. Look at the chart example i gave on this b.o. of the bottom of the range. Look at the range and see all the attempts price traded down to the bottom then reversed back up towards the top of the range. Those were attempts at b.o. of the bottom. If one succeeds you wait for the first p.b. to short or even wait for the second pb if you like. But in the meantime you are "fading all the attempted b.o." That is you are going long at bottom of the range and selling or shorting at the top of the range. There are times a b.o. of the range will occurs but on the first p.b. price gets yanked right back into the range and trades towards the bottom again. You also fade this b.o. As well as any attempted b.o.'s. You actually only trade the actual b.o., in the direction of the b.o., when PA shows it to be a successful B.O.
I love accumulation and distribution too. Have a look at OBV too if you haven't done so already. When both these volume indicators break support/resistance along with price and 20 period ADX above 20 and trending up and rising. This has been a high probability signal for me on every time frame from 5-minute to 1 day. Exit when OBV and Acc/Dist both fall below the lowest low of the past 12 bars. Or you might want to exit if ADX dips too low, or slopes downward, or dips below ADXR (any one of the ADX factors or all of them), which indicates the prevailing trend is potentially ranging, or may be going the other way.
How does an uptrend start, how is it born? In the preceding downtrend (bear market) volume drops to very very low levels as there are just a few sellers remaining - when there are no sellers left, the market has no choice but to start going up. This is how bottoms are formed. Just prior to the birth of the new uptrend, about one inch above the final bottom, if you watch carefully you'll see a boatload of ET traders dumping their shares in disgust - dumping when they should be buying up a storm. They've been doing this since biblical times and will continue, I promise.
Trends start when all the peeps who want to go long, or short, suddenly see the light at the same time, and go...