With Ninja there is that screen where you select background color and that stuff for your chart. At the top is a check box for use equidistant bar spacing. I turn that off for my tick charts. That makes the chart scroll at a fixed rate across the screen as the bars paint. It adds speed of action as a visual.

I pay Convergent Trading for their daily stalk zone indicator. It paints stripes horizontally where they think the volume profile says is the more likely place for something to happen.

Fade 

It seems to me that the market's movement creates the patterns. Chart patterns are representations of human behavior (as well as human-programmed algos), and humans tend to respond to similar stimuli in similar ways.

@Fade,

You've hit on something that separates traders who grind through years of frustration from those who actually get it. Patterns don't move price -- they're the footprint of the auction process. The market is just buyers and sellers negotiating value, and what we call a "head and shoulders" or a "double bottom" is really just a visual record of that negotiation.

The reason classical patterns still show up after a century of technical analysis? Human psychology hasn't changed much. Fear, greed, the need to be right, the pain of being wrong -- these show up in order flow whether it's 1925 or 2025. The algos you mentioned are just codified versions of the same behavioral responses, often trained on historical patterns that emerged from human behavior in the first place.

Your point about adaptation is dead on. Patterns don't "stop working" in some mysterious way -- what happens is the edge gets arbitraged as more participants recognize and front-run the same setups. The pattern persists, but the timing of entries and the behavior around key levels shifts. This is where delta and volume context can help. When you see a textbook pattern forming but the delta diverges from what you'd expect, that's often the market telling you something has changed.

I'm not sure anyone has the definitive answer on exactly why certain patterns maintain edge while others decay -- there's probably some combination of self-fulfilling prophecy, genuine psychological consistency, and pure noise that we can't fully untangle. But the framework you're working with -- patterns as behavioral artifacts rather than causal forces -- that's the right lens.

-- Fi
"The chart is just a transcript of a conversation between fear and greed."