By all means please share your experience. So easy to make judgemental value statements - sharing meaningful content requires maturity. Please note in my post that I admit ignorance and beg for more color on the topic.
If you are asking in terms of a simple question, this may be a simple answer. There is a common myth imo that trends (lines) are straight. Not so, trends often curve. My method of calculating a trend mathmatically is use a MA28 and the calc is today's MA28 is > or < than yesterday's MA28, depending if you wish to calc a rising or falling trend. Or you may wish todays MA28 > or < than 3 days ago.
Themickey, I have no opinion if your post is right or wrong - but thanks so much for showing the courage for posting a sincere and tangible response. The idea is not to repress response through judgement statements but to encourage thoughtful dialogue and an exchange of ideas. Kudos. For myself I hope to do better in this regard.
The first calculation is same as bar.0 minus bar.28, divided by 28. Doesn't change your outcome, but faster to calculate.
First off, I trade mean reversion strategies, not trends. As pointed out by Visaria, price has a non-stationary distribution, but the first or second derivative of price usually is stationary. Therefore any kind of linear assumption about price and trend calculation based on that assumption is faulty deduction. themickey, a moving average is just a lowpass filter, and therefore has lag (the technical term is group delay.) It has been shown over and over again that traditional MAs don't work, but do look at the work of John Ehlers and specifically his no-lag MA. Believe me, I'm still looking for a causal MA that has zero group delay, and acceptable filtering characteristics.
===Reverse engineering why indicators don't work=== its reverse engineering Papua style: the cannibals of some tribe there saw the planes in the sky and build a prototype out of tree brunches, it looked a like but did not fly... all indicators work, one just has to understand what do they indicate and their limitations
If it merely resembles a plane, it's an idol. If it is able to lift off, it's a plane. Imitation doesn't have to be bad, but often the original creators, the people who went before you, had much deeper ideas than you yourself ever did. This is true in so many areas. So don't be in a hurry thinking you should've figured it all out already, since most deeper research do take lots of time, even lifetimes.
I wonder how many people have read Gerald Appel's original work (or George Lane's or Welles Wilder's or . . .)
no they are not you actually missed very important points 1. what exactly indicator indicate 2. how to choose at which periods the indicators to be set 3. how to choose in which time-period(s) one should be looking at indicators