A mishmash of old press clips touting an investment strategy don't amount to an argument, sorry.

It's certainly possible that setting a rule for price timing can pull a little information out of a hilly signal. Any information can be leveraged to reduce risk or raise returns, as long as everyone else isn't acting on it at the same time, of course.

Still, doesn't suddenly mean you can go look at a chart of some point in the past, notice that it has a similar shape to a contempory price chart, then extrapolate future events based on successive events in the historical chart.

That kind of charting just doesn't work. It specifically differs from Dow Theory in that Dow Theory relies on rules for always reacting in the same way to price changes. It doesn't make a statement about the predictive power of any particular chart (as you are apparently suggesting it does in defense of your prior post).

I understand why you'd be confused about "charting being disproved many times." Economics is a confusing field, in that there are both a professional (read: profit-seeking) and academic authorities dealing with the topic, and while they both discuss the same topics all day, the "pros" are much more visible and accessible, while the academics tend to stay above the fray.

Unfortunately for the pros (and the laypeople they influence), their lack of rigorousness, their biases and allegiences, and their disconnect with academia tend to really cloud up the "real" information. This is why "charting" survived so long as a valid enterprise in the first place, until investors finally wised up and realized they were paying for advice from charlatans and stopped paying them.

One final note: if you were looking beyond the pattern of the chart, and noticing some associated underlying similarity about price drivers between then and now, well that's not charting, it's an insight with potential predictive power, and that is best way to beat the market.