Nested horizon trend alignment with a momentum stack

Price as nested clocks

Price can be decomposed into nested horizons. Short-term swings of about two to six weeks sit inside intermediate swings of about six weeks to nine months, which sit inside primary swings of about nine months to two years. Those primary swings are themselves sometimes wrapped in a secular envelope of about ten to twenty-five years.

In this vocabulary the short-term-trend is the two-to-six-week swing nested inside an intermediate-trend, or a still shorter analog on intraday bars. The intermediate-trend is the multi-week to multi-month stair-step inside a primary-trend, typically tied to shifting economic, financial, or political perceptions. The primary-trend is the dominant multi-month to multi-year swing that sets the bias for smaller nested rallies and reactions. A secular-trend is a very long envelope that spans several primary trends and commonly lasts about ten to twenty-five years.

Primary troughs are described as recurring on a cycle of just under four years, with each primary advance or decline typically lasting about nine months to two years rather than tracing a straight line.

Primary state as a classification input

Inside a primary advance, intermediate rallies tend to be the stronger leg and reactions the weaker one. Inside a primary decline the opposite pattern is expected, so the primary state is an input to how nested swings are classified.

An idealized primary advance or decline is sometimes sketched as three intermediate cycles, but that count is only a classification guide because many primary trends do not resolve into three clear intermediate waves.

Entries and exits with the higher horizon

A trend-following rule set can be specified so that short-horizon entries, exits, and abstentions are taken with the primary direction rather than against it. A counter-primary trade is treated as the higher-error branch of the procedure.

A weighted multi-horizon oscillator

A market-cycle-stack is a three-panel map that plots separately smoothed momentum at short, intermediate, and primary lookbacks so the nested clocks can be compared on the same date.

One explicit multi-horizon oscillator is built in three steps: compute four centered rates of change, smooth each with a simple or exponential moving average, then sum the four series after applying integer weights one through four. Rate-of-change here means a centered percentage change of the latest close versus a close n periods earlier, used as raw input to that smoothed oscillator.

A moving-average is the simple or exponential smoother applied to each rate-of-change series, or to price, before a weighted sum or trend state is read. When an exponential-moving-average is used, the update is the prior average plus alpha times the current deviation, and alpha is defined as two divided by the lookback length plus one.

Stochastic oscillators as three clocks

The same three-horizon map can be drawn with a stochastic-oscillator at short, intermediate, and long parameter sets, including 3-3-3, 10-10-6, and 39-26-23, provided other toolbox readings are required to confirm. The stochastic-oscillator is a bounded momentum model of where the latest close sits inside a lookback range, run here at three parameter sets to proxy the three trend clocks.

Agreement without a duration forecast

Reversal confidence is treated as rising when more independent indicators agree, which is the weight-of-evidence practice of requiring several independent technical readings to agree before treating a reversal as more probable. The framework remains probabilistic: no consistent method is given for forecasting a trend's duration or magnitude.

The nesting rule is timescale-invariant. If a multi-day advance is identified as the local primary, a few-hour counterswing is not treated as a standalone short-horizon signal.