Those positive features in many trading techniques can also lead to dangerous losses when market conditions change.
Even the most widely accepted techniques ------ "The trend is your friend," "Buy (or sell) breakouts" and "Buy lows, sell high" ----- can be costly. It's like running an obstacle course, where being 6 feet tall may be an advantage in running on a straightaway but won't help when you have to crawl through a 10-inch tube.
So how can you resolve the contradinctory advice provided by normally sound trading techniques? In discussing trading approaches, you first need to be clear which trends and breakouts you are trying to catch. Trading weekly, daily or hourly trends calls for different techniques.
To be successful, you have to combine several trading techniques, selected so their negative features can cancel out each other while their positive features stay undisturbed. The secret is to apply each technique to a different time frame of market events.
Robert Rhea, the great market technician of the 1930s, compared the three market trends -- major, intermediate and minor --- to a tide, a wave, and a ripple. Most traders, especially those who cannot follow intraday moves, can benefit from intermediate trends, which last from two weeks to two months. You want to ride the wave (intermediate move) while taking advantage of the tide and letting even the ripple run in your favor.
That is the goal of the triple screen system, which uses three consecutive screens, or tests, before entering any trade. Each test uses a different trading approach. Many trades that seem attractive at first are rejected by one or another screen. Those potential trades that pass the triple screen tests have a high degree of profitability.