An article on our blog explores starting your wave count at a meaningful place. The article has helped many traders overcome unreliable wave counts.

There is no correct answer here. However, you’ll generally get the best results by starting counts a little before the beginning of a significant turning point rather than in the middle of a market move.

Where you start the count also depends on which phase of your analysis you’re performing. For example, if you’re beginning your analysis and trying to determine the longer-term context of a market, you might start before the beginning of the most recent long term trend. However, if you are refining your analysis to devise a more immediate price forecast, you might begin just before the last local pivot or swing point.

One way to think of choosing the beginning point of the count is to imagine that you’re going to show a range of a chart to a colleague to ask for his or her opinion. Or, perhaps you’re showing that range to another Elliott Wave analyst to ask for a wave count. In both cases, you’d probably show enough of the chart so that your colleagues can have a basic sense of “where we are” in the context of past market action. The best way to do that would be to include the last “significant” turning point in the chart range, where what is significant depends on the time frame that you are most interested in.

In these examples, WaveBasis is not much different from your colleagues. When you choose a beginning point for your automatic wave count, you decide how much of the chart you want to “show” to WaveBasis to produce the count. So, it’s best to be thoughtful about including enough of the chart range to clarify which market context you are most interested in.

Our reference guide provides valuable tips on preparing for effective automatic wave counts.