A Comprehensive Guide to Elliott Wave Degrees (Timeframes)

Hello Traders. In this supplemental post to my Elliott Wave guide, I will help you understand wave degrees, and what the numbers actually mean when you are labeling each wave.
Identifying the wave level (degree) that you are trading is going to be identified at any given time and will be based on what's known as a "degree".

One of the biggest problems that new Elliott Wave traders have is grasping the structure or "nesting" of the wave patterns (check the diagram within the chart above).

The patterns identified by Elliott himself, occurs across multiple time frames. This means that a completed "five wave" wave structure on a smaller time frame, for example, the 15 minute chart, may represent just the first wave of a larger wave structure unfolding on a 60-minute chart, and so forth. In a micro-macro sense, each of the unfolding wave patterns is just part of a bigger wave pattern unfolding in the higher timeframes. The sequence from wave 1 through 5 completes one wave of a higher degree (again, refer to the diagram above), that is, a wave belonging to the next higher tier of wave sequences. The movements from wave 1 through 5 completes either a wave 1, 3 or 5 of the higher degree, while the a-b-c sequence completes either a wave 2 or 4 of the higher degree.

When you are getting into lower degrees, each wave of the sequence can be broken down into smaller waves accordingly to the same dynamic (this is not so important as many claim to be). The most commonly used degrees are the Primary, Intermediate, and Minor degrees when labeling your micro-macro wave counts. In the diagram above you can see how Wave 1 of the high degree is made up of a smaller 5-wave impulse waves and Wave 2 is made up of smaller three wave corrective waves. And each of these waves is, in turn, always comprised of smaller wave patterns, and so forth.