There are multiple threads that marketsurfer started regarding the existence of stock trends.
If you get 9 heads in a row when flipping a coin, are you in a heads trend?
For those of you who are stat inclined--- Any trend that exists can be quantified and its departure from randomness can be measured with the usual statistical procedures, such as confidence intervals and likelihoods. Serial correlation coefficients, regression coefficients of current changes versus past changes, and magnitudes of the impact of past moving averages on the future, distributions of the length of runs, the correllelogram, the expected waiting times between peaks and valleys, survival statistics. All these techniques are very good at discovering any non-random elements.
None of these indicate trending behavior in the stock market. Trends do exist in other markets but not stocks.
surf