The oil market was unable to continue in a strong bull market because price moved far enough from value to change the situation, encouraging production of oil for many timeframe participants while discouraging its consumption. Thus, a stable trend comes only with relatively slow, relatively small incremental changes in which price moves slowly enough to pull value along with it. While markets can accept or digest a small price change over time, a relatively large price change over time cannot be accepted or digested, since it encourages market entry by those who have the power to end its acceptance or digestion. (Note: at the top or exhaustion point of a trend, incremental changes do not come slowly or in small doses.) Only those who have to buy (short timeframe participants) will buy. Thus, activity must slow as long timeframe traders, who have a choice, sell, rejecting price as too far above value. In order for a trending market to stop and get market activity back to noimal (a trading range), price must move far enough in the trending direction to attract long timeframe participants to stop the activity causing the trend (i.e., long timeframe buyers buying from short timeframe sellers). Volatility Volatility is a much misunderstood market factor, but can be explained and understood using market logic. It exists to a greater or lesser extent in all markets. Each continually produces a series of boom and bust excesses, vacillations which can be controlled or halted only by longer timeframe participants entering or short timeframe participants lengthening their timeframe. When there is diminished long timeframe influence (or when the market is trading only in one timeframe), market activity is very volatile. Thus, the volatility of a marketplace — the measure of the degree of vacillation between high and low in a market — is a function of the mix of timeframe perspective of the participants: markets become very volatile when participants are increasingly trading in the short term, the nearest timeframe. In other words, the tendency for long timeframe participants to shorten their timeframe triggers increased volatility, because their ability to buffer the market is diminished. Illustrating volatility can be accomplished within the framework of a futures marketplace. You have already read that price is used to promote activity and time contains this activity. This means that as the market initially seeks an area that facilitates trade, this area is bounded by other timeframe buyers and sellers, each group responding oppositely to the market-created opportunities presented. As the market moves higher, it creates a selling opportunity for the other timeframe seller.