Quote from tradersaavy:
I am curious to see how people draw their trendlines. Except for major highs/lows, I think it would be interesting to see where people pick their points to draw and how they use these lines as important S/R areas, or targets, or whatever they see. Many traders see the same thing in different ways and hopefully we can learn something from each other.
After studying Wyckoff, I tried to get out of the habit of calling them "trendlines" and call them supply and demand lines instead, though it's proven to be a hard habit to break (plus most people have no idea what you're talking about).
The advantage in calling them supply and demand lines rather than trendlines is that you always know which is which. Rather than get into uptrendlines and downtrendlines and channels and so forth, you just call it what it is, i.e., the supply line is drawn across those levels where supply has entered the market and the demand line is drawn across those levels where demand has entered the market. Whether they are lateral or diagonal is immaterial, and the tests for tentative and confirmed are the same.
Another advantage is that you always have the pair. In an uptrend, this enables you to pick up on changes in the supply line earlier than you otherwise might. If, for example, it has been parallel but is now angled, then there may be a loss of momentum (you can see this in the Naz from the 12th to the 20th; ditto with the NYSE in approx the same period).
Yet another advantage is that you can plot S/D lines within a wider range of S/D lines. For whatever reason, prices will sometimes find R in places that are short of where one would expect to find R based on the supply line that one has drawn. In and of itself, this is nothing to get excited about. But prices may continue to find R short of the primary supply line, but on a line that is parallel to it and inside it. This provides two "levels" of supply line. And all of this of course applies to demand lines and downtrends and so on.
In any case, calling them "demand" and "supply" lines reminds me of what I'm looking for - i.e., where are people buying and where are they selling - in addition to the trend. But even here, "trend" refers not just to whether or not price is rising or falling, but whether the price points that people are willing to pay are rising or falling. In this way, I can evaluate a swing point as to whether it represents exhaustion on the part of buyers or overwhelming supply. As far as whether or not price itself is rising or falling, an MA is a perfectly acceptable representation of trend.