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Indeed. I actually really liked Bill Williams. He was a bit of a legend IMO and a very good speaker. I fear that his approaches to the market are not valid anymore, or need updating. I am sure if he was still around he would have adapted and made them so, but fractals are just not it anymore IMO.
At least with the fractal, the support and resistance lines are consistently drawn. The biggest problem when manually drawing S/R lines is that most people will put them in a different place, even if they have the same information in front of them.
My findings with Fractals (and their respective S/R lines) was that random lines (and I literally mean randomly drawn horizontal lines in the chart) had as much statistical validity as the fractal S/R line. So, I hung up my boots on that one.
However, that isn't to say I didn't find "something" to improve a fractal entry by comparing the CD of the historical fractal with the CD of the just formed fractal when price revisited that new fractal. If the CD was the same or better, it improved the odds of a successful entry. However - if the fractal was trading into an HVN, LVN or historical VWAP, VPOC - the odds dropped to 50/50.
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- Trade what you see. Invest in what you believe -
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That's some really nice analyzing. Just out of curiosity I wanted to ask, Bill talked a lot about Mandelbrot Fractals and natural patterns in his videos, did you happen to research that area?
There is nothing to research. Benoit Mandelbrot first coined the term Fractal in association of calculating the length of a coastline. Mandelbrot invented a new way of measuring irregular natural objects or natural systems. He named it Fractal or, more properly, the fractional dimension. There was no specific Benoit Mandelbrot fractal that applied to trading - he was just a guy. A smart guy, but just a guy.
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- Trade what you see. Invest in what you believe -
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Yes, I did read about it. Also his brook, in which he mentions modeling market behavior with his fractal thingy. That's why I was curious if there was some implication of it for retail trading as well since Bill kept hammering that concept in his seminars. Thanks for sharing your experience ^^
No problem. I think Bill was hammering that everything is a fractal. He did apply the concept of fractals to trading, hence his fractal indicator. The markets have always been fractal in nature under the guise of Chaos Theory. But then again, going to the bathroom is also fractal in nature.
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- Trade what you see. Invest in what you believe -
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I think fractals have a place in the toolbox along with any other tool. I have been working through various applications of Bill Williams' fractals, the 'alligator', awesome oscillator, etc. My interpretations of BW's tools were all wrong initially and found them useless. I eventually turned to reading and studying his books to learn how he used these. There are a number of ways to use fractals other than support and resistance.
I have found that timeframe is an important consideration, particularly with respect to price volatility. We have found profitable uses for them (futures and forex specifically), so for us we see the tools are still relevant in our trading.
I don't disagree that you can find profitable opportunities using fractals. I myself did find that combining them with the cumulative delta could perhaps increase their profitability.
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- Trade what you see. Invest in what you believe -
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