I know that whenever I take a holiday the markets are going to do something surprising, and I will be lying on the beach surreptitiously sneaking a look at the charts on a smart phone concealed in the pages of my summer read.
This year the August trough provided the surprise, not because there was a trough (which was expected, even if it came a bit early) but because of the magnitude of the trough.
I was expecting an 80-day trough to form in about mid August, following what I believed to be a subtle 20-week trough in early June. When the big bounce happened on 8 August 2014 I thought to myself – there we go, the 80-day trough has come in a week early, so everything is looking good.
But John’s post about the impending 40-week trough niggled at the back of my mind, and as the market rose vertically over the next two weeks, it became apparent that this trough was almost certainly an early manifestation of the 40-week cycle trough that John had written about.
How is it possible that I could have been a whole 10 weeks out in my analysis? I find puzzles like this fascinating, and one of the reasons that I enjoy Hurst analysis so much. (Another reason is that even when my analysis is 10 weeks out it is still possible to make profitable trading decisions: if I hadn’t been holiday I would have been standing by to enter a long trade as the market bounced out of the 80-day cycle trough, a trade that would have surprised me in a positive way!)
With the benefit of hindsight I think this is a correct analysis:
You will notice that the phasing at the foot of the chart is looking a bit like an amateur cut-and-paste job, because it is … Sentient Trader won’t give me this analysis with the default nominal model. And the reason is that as good as Sentient Trader is at being flexible in the analysis process, it simply will not allow a 20-week cycle to be only 70 days long. A cycle shape of 70-days must surely be an 80-day cycle, mustn’t it? This is where computer programs and humans part ways. Hurst said that good analysis was more an art than a science, and I think this is a perfect example. That analysis looks good to me, despite the “impossibility” of the 20-week cycle from February to April 2014.
As a matter of interest Sentient Trader will happily provide that analysis if you provide a nominal model with shorter cycles, such as I discussed in this post. Here is the result:
Perhaps this adds weight to the suggestion that cycles are currently running shorter than the nominal model defined by Hurst that Sentient Trader uses by default (although as pointed out by William in this post, that does not mean that the cycles are actually running shorter than usual). But as a bit of a Hurst purist, I must admit that I prefer to stick to the usual nominal model, and accept the occasional “impossibilities”.
This post is an abridged version of the full post which is to be found here: http://hurstcycles.com/the-august-trough/
Hurst Cycles is a relatively new website where I and other analysts discuss the markets and what we think is happening from a Hurst Cycles perspective. Please go along there and take a look.
Have a great week and profitable trading!
