Good points - we all could be saying the same thing so like I said, it's all about time-frame.I can't stress enough, no one is claiming the market is not dipressed or slow. Atleast from what I can gather from ETB and myself. I think ETB and myself have been advocation the bottom hasn't fallen out completely.
Its down but not at sensationalized as expected.
I personally feel the market is taking a breather, looking for a backstop in prices / confidence or something. I think this spring will be a good indicator.
I still believe we won't see a massive correction.. I don't think enough has happened to completely stop the trend and make it go the other direction
The market has three movements
(1) The "main movement", primary movement or major trend may last from less than a year to several years. It can be bullish or bearish. (2) The "medium swing", secondary reaction or intermediate reaction may last from ten days to three months and generally retraces from 33% to 66% of the primary price change since the previous medium swing or start of the main movement. (3) The "short swing" or minor movement varies with opinion from hours to a month or more. The three movements may be simultaneous, for instance, a daily minor movement in a bearish secondary reaction in a bullish primary movement.
I'm not sure what type of technicals you are using, please elaborate (it sounds like a mixture of Fibonacci Retracements and some other type) there seems to be a mix.
I think what you're trying to say is markets are fractal. You have your main swing (higher time frame) and within the main swing you can have mini corrections that retrace by around 50% (60% in your words), but the general movement is the direction of the main swing. I agree with this.
What needs to be realized in this is that, there are higher timeframes than your yearly "main swing". You can have a time-frame of decades. If your "main swing" is in a time-frame of decades, your yearly time-frame becomes your "medium swing". In this case we are due for a correction in the decades time (we are due for a medium swing).
You can take it a step further also, in a 100-year "main swing", the decades time frame becomes your medium swing. The point is, markets are fractal - technical analysis 101.
I would also argue that prices, or markets have two movements, an impulse (what you refer to as the primary movement) which is a movement to the direction of the trend. The second type of movement is a correction which goes against the direction of the trend, these typically pull-back around 50% to 60% (with a statistical edge in stocks, again not used in the housing market). Note that I did not put in sideways, because going sideways means the market price isn't changing.
Back to the original point, we are all bullish in Vancouver in the long run, but this impulse or main swing that you are speaking of has been happening in the larger time-frame. We have been going up since 2000, on a large time frame, it's due for a healthy correction which will bring us back to about 2008 - 2009 prices (purely from a technical analysis perspective). Also keep in mind, in technicals - higher time frame always trumps smaller time frame for the direction of the price.
I would be extremely careful applying technical analysis on the Vancouver real estate market. Although i love to use technicals for high volume stocks, commodities or forex - they don't work as well on markets where volumes are low (1000s of sales per month on realestate, vs hundreds of millions in the exchange). The human psychology is definitely still there, but it's hard to do this kind of analysis when you don't have the High, Low, Open , Close prices.
Best to use a mix of fundamentals and technicals in this market in my opinion - good points none the less.