In my case those occurrences are in the hundreds of thousands. I was talking to a group the other day and we estimated we have watched, researched or documented over a half million real-time oscillations, each, in a variety of fractal charts. I'd say that was a sufficient size data set to extract some decently reliable data outcomes.
I don't have time to actually run this for you but I'll guess that somewhere between 200 and 2000 observations would give you some good confidence levels, depending on how you structure what you want to prove and the level of confidence required. Similar work in pharmaceutical and consumer testing uses about this number of subjects. A recent consumer testing study on weight loss diets where I did the IT consulting but not the statistics had 460 subjects. This was enough to support a claim of efficacy with the FDA. For Phase III trials most pharmaceutical companies want several thousand subjects as they have a large liability when a drug goes bad and they get a class action lawsuit.
I would agree that there is randomness. It's a chaotic system which oscillates between totally random and probabilistic behavior. The trick is to distinguish between these prior to making a trade. One method I use is to calculate the correlation coefficient of the predicted behavior of market in relation to its actual behavior at each bar and only trade when the first order derivative of this coefficient is increasing. This of course has a lag based on the number of bars into the future that Iâm trying to predict. I've never worked with fractals in the market, but use Wavelets. Do you have any links to sites that would give some information on fractals in the market? People cling to old methods for a number of reasons: 1) Fear of the unknown 2) Internal insecurity manifesting as an imprudent dependence on what they already know and an aversion to something new which they may have to learn. 3) Viewing themselves as an expert in a field and feeling they have to maintain that status by keeping different ideas at bay. 4) Having failed in an area and wanting others to fail as well...misery needs company. Jerry030
Wavelets and price fractals are interchangeable as I use them. Most references to "price fractals" are in relation to Elliott Wave, Gann, Fibonacci, cycles and momentum indicators. I personally do not follow those lines of analysis as I find them too inconsistent. I have found that pure price is perfect and then viewing that pure price movement in fractals or, as you are familiar with, wavelets, gives a trader a reasonable and consistent view of trading opportunites inside the larger or longer term moves of price.
Try this one on for size... http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/cache/p...zSzbibliographyzSzlo_mck_88.pdf/lo88stock.pdf Stock Market Prices Do Not Follow Random Walks: Evidence from a Simple S p e c i f i c a t i o n T e s t Andrew W. Lo A. Craig MacKinlay University of Pennsylvania In this article we test the random walk hypothesis for weekly stock market returns by comparing variance estimators derived from data sampled at different frequencies. The random walk model is strongly rejected for the entire sample period (1962- 1985) and for all subperiod for a variety of aggregate returns indexes and size-sorted portofolios........