Buckets and Time Machines
A guide to thinking in 4 dimensions
Can you actually grasp what stopping time to inspect what is coming means?
Imagine a faucet turned on to high as you are filling up the bathtub. And you want a perfectly warm bathwater. (BTW this is a magic bathtub where entropy is not a factor. Ergo hot stays hot. ** The point is, what is already in the tub cannot change. Change comes from what is coming in.) In order to make this perfectly warm bath water, you would like exactly 50/50 ratio hot to cold. If you could stop time and see exactly how many hot water and how many cold-water molecules coming in, you could relate that to what is already in the tub. If you could get that granular information about the water, you could slice time more and more, so you can count how water is filling your tub in 1 sec, 1min, 10min, or even hourly increments. I wonder how kewl that would be.
Each slice of time will represent a finite amount of water expanding out from the point the water comes into the tub to encompass the entire tub. It is like a series of concentric circles each with its own picture of hot to cold ratio. It would make sense what you would look for when doing comparative analysis. Each contributing to the makeup of the water as a whole or as part of a shorter time slice. If it helps you any, imagine the series of concentric circles as a series of buckets inside of buckets. You would see how things can change from shorter time slices and see how things lead to the trend or how the trend develops. I wish I had such a time machine!!
But then you would say, well that sounds really kewl and geeky but I’m not a math wizard. I’m really a mental midget. Now what if I represent each of those buckets graphically so you can make decisions. Maybe some line graphs or hey what about candles that turn blue and red if it is mostly cold or hot. And maybe some oscillators? Would that help?
Just a thought. Perhaps if you watched enough Star Trek like I did, you might be able to understand what I’m eluding to. Imagine the type of analysis you could do if you had such a time machine.
Thankfully, I’ve watched every Star Trek apart from the original series. I’ll will try to put explicitly to what is implied implicitly. Buckets are the way that you view multiple dimensions on a single plain. In the context of technical analysis, it is the way you view pricing action over time from multiple time frames.
For example, if you are a 2D entity, being able to see the entirety of a 3D object is impossible.
If you are a 3D entity (which we are), being able to see the entirety of a 4D object is impossible. Time can be chosen as a 4th dimension and that is the aspect to which disciplined in technical analysis must be able to see.
For the example given the faucet of hot and cold are representative of the market buying and selling. Unlike in the real would were it is impossible to zoom in and see the individual molecules from the faucet you are able to see the buy and sell action of the market over time. Ergo, the small portion of the price action is going to feed into the overall picture of how price is trending.
Seconds > Minutes > Hours > Days > Months > Years
When analyzing a specific chart, it doesn’t make sense to only stick to one. The context to which price is moving matters as much as the movement in a particular point in time. If you were looking only at a 1 second chart and nothing else, it would be almost impossible for you to comprehend the price action over the course of the year. Hence, your ability to shift between multiple time frames matters as much as your ability to analyze a specific time frame.
The “Time Machine” is the ability to see and predict what is happening on a smaller timeframe that will contribute to ‘filling in the bucket’ of the larger time frame.