Elliott wave paradox?

Hi, I am looking into Elliot wave theory. It seems to me it is not possible to know what type of wave structure price is in until after the fact. How is it possible to trade on this information if it's all based in hindsight?

you could ask the same about any other indicator, analysis and so on. Everything is based on hindsight, only few things in life have predictive value.

I share the same opinion. The context free grammar generated by Elliott's rules is not LALR parsable. It is only explanative. You can always find a set of future swings which will invalidate the current counting arbitrarily far backward.

Trading EW seems to be a matter of gauging the potential reward if the counting is correct versus the risk if the counting will be invalidated later; and also how it may be invalidated. Then managing the trade accordingly. I suspect the R:R of the successful EW traders is much greater than 1:1.

PipMeUp ....... That is spot on. In my early trading days I took a look at Elliott, but just could never get my mind
around it enough to make it work for me. Maybe I just didn't try hard enough. Anyway just my 2 cents.