When it comes to price action, there is no such thing as "noise"; there is no such thing as "ranging". There are only waves, or oscillations, of different magnitudes and time frames, continuously superimposed on each other. An endlessly recursive fractal pattern. True or false? I'm interested to hear your opinion.
Good if it helps to trade successfully. Until there is a practical benefit from looking at price movements as either waves or noise it is just semantics. Elliott developed a theory of order in the waves which some seem to use successfully and others not, like many methods.
I can accept your description as a good one which apart from anything else is so because a market is not a static price but a moving one. From the observations you make you have to make a decision. What are you going to do about it? How are you going to make money from the market on the basis of your observations? Lets look at it on a daytrading basis. The gyrations may conveniently be seen as two patterns, the larger over the smaller. You can see the micro trading gyrations and you can arbitrarily set the magnitude (say a minimum of 15 points on YM or CL, bar close to bar close); over this you can see the larger gyrations which again you may set arbitrarily at, say, 45 points on CL. Sometimes the macro will co-incide with the micro. The Friday CL session (5/23/08) had 48 gyrational 'legs' (up/down repeating) of minimum 15 points (ie 15 cents); it had 12 macro 'legs' of minimum 45 points. Now you can see the juice of riches waiting to fall into your hands.
As William Gibson said, âthere are no maps for these territories.â Whatever you discover will probably be original, not in the sense that you'd be the very first to make the discovery but in the sense that you'd be joining an exclusive club of traders who know something that isn't public knowledge and they don't even know each other as members. Good luck with your research.