Another good place to bring up this excellent study... http://sfgalternatives.com/wp-conte...h-managed-futures-historical-perspectives.pdf
Every chart has a current bar. One can go ‘inside’ the current bar to view on a faster timeframe. This changes one’s ‘vertical’ orientation of price to a ‘horizontal’ one. At this level of resolution, the market cycles through an ever repeating order of events as sentiment is dynamic from bar to bar. Going up or going down in timescales will exhibit the same observable order of events per that scale of resolution. Whatever the resolution, there is the faster cycling ‘within’ the bar and the slower cycling of the slower timeframe that bounds the PA of all the faster one’s within. In every timeframe there are ‘trending’ bars where the trend is just composed of a single bar of 1 to 3 legs. Any of these legs can trend. There are also price cases that trend which are two bar combinations. There are 10 unique price cases. Two bar combinations can be built to annotate trends that contain multiple bars. All of the above can form ‘trend segments’ when they are combined to form larger trends. A trend is defined in this context as composed of three price moves. The three price moves are Dominance to non-Dominance and return to Dominance. These three price moves are correlated to four volume moves. With the above shift of orientation, it becomes possible to observe volume as the independent variable that leads the dependent variable of price. Without that shift in perspective and perception, the observation is blocked by the prescription of beliefs consciously and unconsciously grounded in CW and no such correlation exists nor is possible. The measurement of CW beliefs active can be derived from an emotional measure. Fear, anxiety, anger and doubt are well known emotions and the frequency and amplitude of those emotions give a good idea of where one is currently located in the spectrum of supportive and unsupportive beliefs as it relates to successful trading.
After reading this posting I realize that my definition of trend is completely different from what most people define as trend. I live already so many years in my own "trading world" that I think that what see and do is obvious for everybody, and is also done by them in the same way. I now realize this is not the case.
It depends on the time frame. That said, if you look at the longer term time frame, chances are good, most stocks are either trending up or trending down. During that time frame, for shorter durations, it could be stuck to a trading range before it breaks out higher or lower.
that's probably an explanation why "traders make most of the money only on 20% of their trades" like someone recently was telling me (with which i disagree) its irrelevant how much market trends until one has a precise definition of the trend, which must include how to define the period in which trend is observed, how trend starts and where it ends but then it will be even more irrelevant because having determined how to define trend one can keep switching form one period to another one ...
True, markets are always trending on one timeframe or another. For example, a market that is consolidating on the daily and weekly chart might still be trending on the monthly. Similarly a market that is consolidating or going sideways on the 15m chart will still look like it is trending up and down on a 1m chart.