While the identification of cycles is admittedly not a pure science, a great deal of effort has gone into their validation. One thing to bear in mind is that the cycles we’ll talk about in the next section vary greatly in their length.
The key to their use is to identify the most critical cycle in the particular market you’re investing in and use it to guide your trading decisions, while keeping an eye on the longer and shorter cycles that are less impactful, but nonetheless have bearing.
The shorter cycles, for instance, can be used to fine-tune your market entry and exit points, while the longer cycles can be used to monitor overall market trends. Of course, all that sounds great in theory, but given the criticality of the word “approximate” mentioned earlier, putting that into practice can be difficult, taking time and persistence to learn to do well.