Definately not a stupid question blue..in fact many get frustrated with EW and call it malarky..haejin brought up a really good point when he first started blogging in his training videos.."if you use EW alone, you will most likely lose all your money", but "if you use EW with TA and some indicators, in can help augment your analysis enough to where you feel more comfortable with your trades...another hard thing to do is ladder...there are a lot of traders that stop out and that's it..which is fine..i know a lot of day traders that are successful this way...but haejin's technique of laddering in on the way down puts you in a more comfortable position so you don't allocate all of your funds at once..BTW, your understanding of the diagonals is correct, but the only thing is when there is a leading diagonal, it means the trend has changed (bearish in this case for now until proven otherwise) because if will have a post bounce and then finish the last part..so you may see a leading diagonal start from a downtrend (up down up) and then the downtrend proceeds after this short term trend change to allow the correction to complete...or you may see a leading diagonal start from an uptrend, telling you that you may have a down up down to finish that short term trend change...in equities and futures i rarely saw leading diagonals as a wave 1 of a starting impulse, so this tells you that you are in a corrective phase, but crypto is different..triangles are abundantly clear of course along with expanded flats...this is why I've learned a great deal from haejin on the crypto side of EW.....now with that all being said..nobody knows for sure what's going to happen..corrective phases are the worst to predict..that's why the huge upward trend in the last few months was great to deal with...when i see these types of corrective moves, i lighten up a bit, hold the strong coins and dump the stragglers, and then wait for a more clearer picture...make sure to check out the book on TA that haejin recommends for the TA side...EW takes time..i wasn't really comfortable until about 2 years in..and i realized you cannot use it alone...an interesting thing i told haejin was that the futures market was even harder due to the fact that high frequency bots were just destroying the natural fabric of the markets..crypto was one of the most pure forms of human psycology and will change in time now that large algos are going to move in and futures is now upon us...i knew once they were in, the movements of the markets would change considerably..i was wrong ...i thought it would become more volatile..but instead it went to a crawl...i really hope they haven't taken the wind out of the sails yet...i just don't see how considering the infancy of this technological revolution...hope this helps some..sorry for the long rant..cheers friend