This is nonsense. Downturn is how you describe consecutive periods of lower prices after they happen. It's a trailing analysis! It's impossible to say with cert

This is nonsense. Downturn is how you describe consecutive periods of lower prices after they happen. It's a trailing analysis! It's impossible to say with certainty that you are ever "in" a downturn for an instrument - a moment of consecutive successful buying(price increases) ends the downturn, the time you thought you were "in" it was actually the moment after it ended. This type of trading mentality is why the 90/90/90 statistic exists. People read this, believe it, and become sellers when they would have been buyers or non-participants. The only thing that matters is right now if you are trading. Yesterday is irrelevant, your [N]-period MA's, fib lines, gann fans, and other indicators are equally irrelevant. If you are on a commercial trading floor, ask the guy next to you "are we having a bull day/week/month/year or a bear one?". Either you get laughed at, or completely ignored. The people actually causing these numbers that people see visualized at charts aren't even looking at them! They likely aren't looking at charts at all! If that last statement seems too "oh no it can't really be that way, I see charts on MSNBC so they must be professional tools!" to you, then find a friend who works for a market-related institution, and ask them. You might be surprised at the answer. Now the interesting part, is if you can get enough people to believe they are in a "downturn", then you influence them into becoming sellers opposed to buyers. This only turns "down" if enough institutional size believes selling is more immediately profitable than buying or non-participation. A good way to incite this belief is to publish it to major news sites. Like bloomberg(another word that will cause hilarity and snark if uttered on the trading floor). Do you know why your financial-news network is a free channel? They want you to see it. Anything that can encourage you to participate means there is more amateur liquidity available. Institutions really like amateur liquidity. After consumption, your exit(at your loss and their gain) is assured, since your pain threshold is orders of magnitude lower than theirs. One last bit about "patterns".... your brain is a pattern recognition machine. It's the reason you think you see "text" right now, instead of a purple giraffe. It's also the reason you see shapes in complete randomness: your brain wants to categorize things it sees, and we call that categorization a pattern. Patterns are death to a day trader: 100% financial death. Repeat that to yourself each morning before you walk into the pit, or you will walk out bankrupt.