Quote from: CoinBurner on September 10, 2014, 09:34:26 AM

Thanks for the excellent analysis as always!
When I first came across the EW theory (just a few months ago Grin

) , I had the impression that the individual analyst intuition had to play a major role in wave labeling and identification of waves personalities.
Your methodology however seems to also make use of an extremely rigorous mathematical analysis, with several different counts and sub-counts, strict invalidation levels, etc... it seems a huge amount of work, especially when you start to go deep in the sub-sub-waves counts!! Shocked

So my question is - how big a role do experience and intuition play [if any] in the EW analyst work? Is there a point after which you can start to "read" wave counts and select the most likely one out of many, prior that strict invalidation levels come into play?

I'm trying to answer each point in order here...

Experience plays a huge role in counting waves. It's relatively easy to do, but some other factors go into choosing more and less probable counts. There are three simple rules to EW; 1)Wave-2 can not retrace more than 100% of wave-1. 2) Wave-3 is never the shortest wave. and 3) Wave-4 can not retrace into the price territory of wave-1. If you strictly adhere to these rules, it's not so hard. Then there are also a handful of guide lines that make things clearer, though the guide lines are not rules, but more often than not, waves follow the guide lines. Things like Alternation; Says that if wave-2 is a sharp correction, wave-4 will be more sideways and vice versa.
Fibonacci makes the targets a piece of cake as long as you have the right count. For instance, My previous wave-V count was invalidated, but since my targets were hit leading up to the invalidation, the latter waves were counted properly, but something else was amiss. That is when I revise my count and decide where things changed. Some counts/targets can also be correct but take vastly different paths to get there, which is why I have many running counts at any given time.

Intuition should be left out, as difficult as it may be. It is the same as a gut feeling, and while you may be right some, or even most times, it's no different than a guess. EW is a way to gauge probabilities and manage risk by having stops (which I will get into soon). It also tells you what is possible and what is impossible to happen next.

When you have many counts, you begin to see a move coming before it is even expected by your main count. I posted the chart in post #248 because of the underlying technicals and some other things going on. I guess you can say it was intuition, but I felt a change coming that was going to invalidate my count at the time, so I posted the chart. In fact, that is what I use this thread for. Kind of a "thinking out loud" of my thoughts (counts) as the market moves.

I hope I covered everything and answered your question.