Quinn - actually I want to thank you for introducing Ichimoku concept in this forum. I have been merely lurking around this forum anonymously for the past few days or so, but after checking out your charts and correlating them to gold movement, it appears to be most rather accurate. Most of the trends you mentioned came true.


To the other gold investors here:
Give Quinn a break. He was trying to point us to a very powerful tool. And a tool is useless in your hand unless you yourself learn to use it. Others can't learn it for you. We should do some leg work ourselves to understand the charts. He can't teach us every detail on such charts!

Anyway, I am totally new to ichimoku, too, but you can pick it up quite fast.

Below are the two webpages that I personally found helpful. It took me less than an hour to read and digest (a) yesterday, and avoided a heavy loss from simply buying gold  because "Bernanke is going to speak, so gold will go up" reasoning. It is madness to invest like that!

Check it out carefully:
a) http://www.investopedia.com/articles/techn...p#axzz1YZAekAr2
The above link explains the ichimoku charts terminology, and what it means when the various lines cross each other, or when the lines enter into the cloud (kumo) etc.

b) Free Ichimoku online chart at http://www.profinanceservice.com
It's in Russian, so click on the American flag top left corner to change language to English. Locate Chart , click web instead of java link (don't know why but real-time Java does not work). You can select L to make the chart larger. Then in the drop down boxes above the chart, select COMMOD, GOLD. In the drop down boxes below the chart, select ichimoku. You can select refresh at different intervals, and watch the ichimoku chart at work.  From your web-browser,  use zoom in to see the chart details/lines more clearly.
     Note: I think there is some lag for the webpage version, but it's better than nothing. Ok for non-forex traders like me.
              If anyone has a better free online, realtime ichimoku chart website, please share!

Once you understand (a), you can observe the trend from the chart in (b).

If you read (a), it would be the best one hour you invest in educating yourself in a powerful tool, and also to save yourself a lot of heartache especially in this expensive and volatile gold market. Of course, it's no problem for those who want to invest long-term, but those who are short/medium term investors, the charts help you decide when to go in, exit or do nothing.

Again, thanks to Quinn for pointing out ichimoku to us newbies. Domo arigato!

NB: Ichimoku is useful but nothing is 100% accurate and can guarantee to make you a millionaire. As Quinn keeps saying, you decide before investing, and good luck!