Posting the chart of a trend you like and an entry point as well as a trade in a range might help us all see whether we think it is prediction or not. I'm not suggesting you show us you "special" indicator or anything you consider proprietery. I followed this thread for awhile and I think prediction or not question is more or less a question of semantics so pretty much everyone with a dog in this fight will probably think I'm wrong. If I had to come down on one side or the other I'd say it is predicting. At a minimum you are predicting that the edge you have tested and made money with in the past is still in force. Markets may not change in fundemental ways but things that worked for some years can also not work for a year before they work again. A year is a long time to keep the faith and few, if any of us, would. And, some things that have had very good runs for many years have disappeared for decades and maybe forever.
This article is all you need to understand in order to be educated on the subject. http://www.statsoft.com/textbook/time-series-analysis/#systematic
It depends entirely how you define 'prediction'. If you define prediction as an expectation about how the future is likely to turn out (e.g. 'I am buying because I expect the market is more likely to rise a lot than fall') then trend-following, and indeed all profit-seeking market behaviour, depends on prediction. If you define a prediction as 'this will DEFINITELY happen in the future' then it isn't based on prediction.. Some people think if they are betting on probabilities then they are not predicting the future. But IMO they are - they are just predicting it on a probabilistic basis, rather than certain belief. And since nothing about the future is certain (see 'induction' and David Hume), ALL claims and expectations about the future are probabilistic.
If you follow someone down the street are you predicting where they are going? If you follow the market, you aren't predicting where it is going, it could go anywhere after you start following it. Sometimes it will keep going in one direction and that will make you money, other times it will turn around and you can stop following it the original way take a small loss and then start following it the other way. To follow a market, you first have to wait for it to start moving. There is no point tying up your margin trying to follow a market which is quiet and rangebound. In your example the 6 bar drop is a signal to start following the market down, it is not making a prediction that you will make money if you do so.
No, but you wouldn't follow someone on the street if you didn't predict there'd be a benefit to doing so (just like you wouldn't follow the market if you didn't expect it to lead to profits), that's what surf is arguing - it's just a matter of perspective, doesn't much matter either way imo....unless you're randomly following people on the street, in which case I think there's laws against that.
surf we get it ,you dont do TA,do you have to post it in ten differnt threads weekin week out for months