Trend lines drawn after the fact

[Shadow Trader]

Trend lines look wonderfully clear on a finished chart. Two touches, a third bounce, a neat diagonal. On a live chart, the picture is messier. Which two points define the line? Does a wick count or only a close? How many touches make it valid?

Because trend lines involve judgment, two traders draw different ones from the same price history. And the same trader redraws the line as new candles arrive, quietly moving it to fit the latest price action. The line that "worked" is the one adjusted until it did.

A discipline that helps: draw the line, timestamp it, take a screenshot, and don't move it. Then see what happens. After fifty such lines, the hit rate is an honest statistic.

Another option is using objective alternatives that serve a similar purpose, like a regression channel or a moving average slope, which don't allow retroactive adjustment.

None of this makes trend lines useless. It makes them subjective, and subjective tools need extra care to evaluate.

There's also the problem of timeframe hopping. A line that fails on the one-minute chart gets redrawn on the five-minute chart, where it looks perfect. The method has so many degrees of freedom that it can't lose, which also means it can't be shown to win.

Has a record of unadjusted trend lines ever been kept, and how did their results compare with memory?