When a turning point is only the grain

A sharp elbow on a monthly chart can be a pile of invoices, not a change in the market. Change the grain before you change the story.

Boards love an elbow. A monthly line that suddenly drops looks like a decision waiting to be made. In this atelier we treat elbows as suspects. Wholesale counters in Tbilisi often post a quiet week into the last working day of the month. The monthly chart then shows a cliff that a weekly overlay turns into a pile.

Newspaper charts are especially prone to this, because a Saturday page wants a shape. Our paid sheets are allowed to be less theatrical. If a turning point survives a change of grain, a change of start month, and the removal of one extraordinary year, we will annotate it. If it does not, we write that the series is noisy and the forecast range is wide.

Clients sometimes ask us to keep the dramatic monthly version for the corridor and the weekly version for the finance clerk. We will draw both. We will not pretend they tell the same story.