You will kindly similarly excuse MY delay in responding. I have been pondering a response for a long time, but could not formulate one because I could not understand your post. Then an analogy came to me in a dreaming confabulation. I am at a party. I feel up a drunken woman. One of three things will follow. She won't even feel it. She will feel back. She will slap me. How does the certitude that one of these three things will follow help me in making my initial decision? Let me digess for a moment. To study SCT is heuristic. To read your posts similarly is heuristic. In fact, if one may dignify this concatenation of catcalls as a debate, I hope that our readers find this debate heuristic. After my point sinks in, I will explain why I think the FTT and its three possible consequences are meaningless.
In the old country, I was professor of dialectics. I offer my services to ask spydertrader questions to elucidate the Hershy methods.
OK, I'll go along with the gag. But as a putative non-native speaker, be aware that to an educated English speaker, "dialectic" is the third word in the phrase that begins with "Marxist-Leninist".
Ah hypo, you are a trader's trader. Waking up early on a Saturday morning thinking about trading. Refreshing. As an aside, I am working on an SCT state machine. I will hit up Spyder at any stateless signposts.
To continue, let us consider rationally the origins of SCT. Suppose that you are a deraged NQ trader named N.Q. Enqueue. The last trade is at 1815. Clever fellow that you are, you recognize a round number and are prepared for a reversal. Hypostomus, however, fetishist that he is, sees only a fib retrace from a previous high. Superstitious John Merchant sees only a fib extension from a previous low. Socrates isn't looking at NQ at all, he sees that QM just turned. Thomas Jackson sees historical parallels with the Confederate cotton market of 1862. Rahula Gautama sees that one more tick will make two EneMAs cross over. Art Deco realizes that a floor rotation is ending. Lao Tzu just cast his favorite lucky pigs knuckle bone. Duref Mudgins divines pain and anxiety at this price point. David Hume's stop is one tick away. What the next tick will be is totally deterministic, but so chaotic that it appears random. Now SCT takes two such chaotically determined turning points, draws a straight line through them, and equally as irrationally as the examples I mentioned above believes that the extension of that line has significance. But they don't believe, really, because they opine that price could bounce off that line (FBO), continue past that line (BO), or fail to reach it (FTT). What Joe Doaks knows is that the only thing that counts is the quantitative codependence of the time functions of price and volume at every given tick. Not just THIS tick, or THAT tick, but EVERY tick.
PTR, can you elaborate on your state machine, in a way that does not give it away? I was once a dynamicist, so I can understand. Transformations, eigen vectors, eigen values, all that. I used to say that I was a happy man if I woke up alive and with a hard on. Now, like Jack, I just wake up dreaming of the markets.
Trader Nation is old conventional orthodoxy. I look forward to Trader World, with an office on the 1560th floor of the CME building - yes, it will be pressurized - built to commemorate the methods and mark the long term bottom of the bull.
Hypo, of all the characters in ET you are truly the most funny indeed. OTOH, good to see Joe figured it out.... There is grey matter out there after all..