A Head & Shoulders Top...

... NOT!
Present and accounted for are the critical signifiers:
1) The price pattern
2) The appropriate volume:price relationship

[click to enlarge]

Pattern recognition, however, is akin to a Rorschach Test -- each of us perceives only that which we want to see; thus, we misperceive all too easily. Studying the same pattern, one person might view it as bullish whereas another views it as bearish, one sees risk and another opportunity. Let's look again at this chart, sans studies...

[click to enlarge]

Let's tame the seemingly wild oscillations in price via dropping the lagging zero (moving the decimal point one slot to the left); this results in an alltime high of $21.68 and a subsequent low of $17.25. No longer so terrifying, eh? In fact, this stock has held up especially well in the face of an ugly market. Note, for example, the higher low at a time the market concurrently made a lower low.

Yes, this is yet another 'loving' gaze upon Google/GOOG, which will report Q1 earnings after the close this Thursday. I bet that between the close today and that of Friday, the share price will be higher than now (~$192). And yet the bearish talk ("Watch out below!") echoes in the canyons of Wall St.

The bears are wrong. And when a widely-recognized pattern such as a H&S top fails, then I cry out, "Watch out above!" I previously have exhorted you to recognize Google/GOOG as a singular investment opportunity, worthy of the attention of all investors irrespective of time frame. After all, the insights of that great trader, Burton Pugh resonate for me, as they should for you...

"To the professional short-turn trader who can spend all his time at the exchange, it is, of course, permissible and expected that he will try to secure frequent fragmentary profits in an effort to compound them into larger funds, but this is not investment. Few are the ones who can afford to become 'professionals' and, in the final wind-up of a financial campaign, the outright investor following [a] plan will far exceed the results achieved by the less patient in-and-out trader."