Most of Elliott Wave is interpretation: probabilities, best guesses, alternate counts. But three rules are absolute. They are never bent, never overridden. And their value isn't that they tell you what happens next. It's that they hand you a precise price at which your read is provably wrong.
Three hard boundaries. Wave 2 stays above the red line; Wave 4 stays above the amber line; Wave 3 is longer than at least one of 1 and 5. Cross a line and the count you were trading is gone, no debate.
RULE 1Wave 2 never retraces more than 100% of Wave 1. It can go deep (60%, 80%, even a whisker under), but if it closes below where Wave 1 began, this wasn't a Wave 1 and Wave 2. Something else is going on.
RULE 2Wave 3 is never the shortest of waves 1, 3, and 5. Usually it's the longest and most powerful. It doesn't have to be the longest, but it can't be the runt. If your "Wave 3" is the smallest of the three, your labels are wrong.
RULE 3Wave 4 never enters the price territory of Wave 1. The pullback after the big third wave has to stay clear of where the first wave traded (in a standard impulse). The moment it overlaps, the impulse count is broken.
Why this is the whole game
A count you can't invalidate is a story. A count with a hard line that kills it is a trade, because that line is your stop. It's decided before you enter, by the structure, not by your emotions in the moment. Every setup on this site carries the price that kills it.
This is the quiet superpower of the method. You don't need to be right about the future. You need to know, in advance and to the tick, the price that proves you wrong, so a bad idea costs you a small, planned loss instead of a big, argued-with one.