Yes, I agree in principle with Dr. Elder, however part of the problem is the way that traders study charts. If you only look at a completed intraday chart, you will get used to seeing a fully developed signal and resulting move or failure. Seeing it on the right side of the chart you have no supporting information to help your decision making process, AND you have to overcome the automatic scaling process that changes your visual perspective. For those reasons, I suggest that traders never study completed charts. Instead it helps to either print out partial charts and use them like flashcards, or if your software permits, step through your charts one bar at a time, stopping just long enough to make your "decision" based on the indicators you are using. If you can't make good decisions on that basis, how will you make any better judgements during trading hours?
As regards the use of the ADX/DMI, I think people should take the time to read the literature and become knowledgeable about the indicator. After that it is up to the trader to use his brain. You can make use of indicators IF you understand their strengths and weaknesses. For example, if one were to put the most important market sectors on a screen, you could use that information as a confirmation of a change in the DMI crossover signal. Using some variation of that input, you could wait for sectors to move above some threshold, and then as the DMI signalled a trade you would have percentages in your favor. Studying this you might learn that certain sectors need to be moving in your favor in order to have a high percantage long trade in a specific stock.
Remarkable to me that you folks debate just about everything but the important issues that define your trading environment, and for some reason, most of you are unwilling to actually read documentation and try to synthesize some approach to the problem.
Good luck
Steve