Price Action

When the Timeframes Disagree

Open the hourly and it is trending. Open the daily and it is a range. Traders treat this as a puzzle to resolve — pick the correct timeframe, or let the higher one overrule the lower. Both moves are wrong, because the two charts are not two opinions about one market. They are one series sampled at two rates, and every disagreement between them is arithmetic rather than evidence. This paper shows that the swing rule from the first paper and the touch rule from the second both take the sampling rate as a hidden argument, which makes the timeframe the definition of their numbers rather than a lens on them. What replaces the question is not an answer but a discipline: state the scale beside the result, because the result was never about the market alone.

Difficulty

Advanced

Reading time

45 min

Pages

23