the only certainty in life is death. i can confirm with 100% certainty that you will die. all the rest in life is uncertain. the difference between a loser and a profitable trader depends on how good someone is in guessing.
Could you elaborate a bit on the above ... do you use this for intraday trading ? What are you looking for specifically ?
I look at the MACD to see if we are gaining or losing momentum as we approach technical price levels. Just basic momentum divergence. The tricky part is in understanding which timeframe is in control of the current move.
1, 5,15 ,1 h, 4h, daily, weekly. Decisions are made from the 1 and 4 hour charts. The lower time frames I watch just for fun and dont give them too much importance. Lately the hold time on my trades has been from 1 day to a week or two.
I'm guessing that by "technical price levels" you mean mostly "levels of previous support and/or resistance"? In which case I broadly agree with you: that strikes me as a far more realistic and practicable usage of the MACD than are attempts to use it an an entry-method, per se. Unfortunately, though, many people are still using it with inappropriate settings based on long-distant historical market "timings": they tend to be the ones with the numbers 12 and 26 in the settings (which date from a 6-day trading week, for stocks, when 12 was the number of trading days in 2 weeks and 26 the average number of trading days in a calendar month: all perhaps once relevant to trading stocks from daily charts). I don't understand your point there quite so clearly, but that speaks mostly to different people having different perceptions, I think: I don't, myself, think of trading in terms of time-frames "being in control of" current price movements.
Technical levels to me are just inflection points where price has reversed or consolidated in the past. Basically places where other traders may be looking to enter or exit the market and thus the changes in momentum. By timeframes I mean that lets say we are in a downtrend on the hourly but there is bullish momentum building on the 5 minute and price is going up. Id expect the short term trend to end as we approach a technical level and the hourly trend down to resume. It takes a while for momentum from the 5 minute to change the direction of the hourly. At least thats how I understand the market.