Confluence

Confluence is the word for several methods pointing at the same place — a moving average, a retracement level and a previous swing all sitting close together, for instance. The idea behind it is that agreement between independent observations is worth more than any one of them on its own. The word independent is where the care is needed. Almost every tool on a chart is computed from the same series of prices, so two of them agreeing is often one fact expressed twice rather than two facts: an average, a band drawn around that average and an oscillator built from the same closes are not separate witnesses. Counting more tools also makes agreement easier to find, because with enough lines on a chart something is always near something else. What can be checked is where each reading came from, which is why the honest version of confluence is a written note of the inputs rather than a count of the lines.