The MAD indicator

As an application to the windowing technique described the the previous article, John Ehlers proposed a new trend indicator that he claimed is robust and yet simple. The latter is certainly true, as the MAD (Moving Average Difference) oscillator is, as the name says, just the difference of two moving averages normalized to +/-100. Continue reading “The MAD indicator”

Better Indicators with Windowing

If indicators didn’t help your trading so far, just pimp them by preprocessing their input data. John Ehlers proposed in his TASC September article the windowing technique: multiply the input data with an array of factors. Let’s see how triangle, Hamming, and Hann factor arrays can improve the SMA indicator.

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Moving Average Bands

Compared to plain indicators, bands have the advantage that they look more colorful on charts. And they offer more lines to trigger trade signals. In this way, bands beat any old single-line indicator hands down. This was also noticed by Vitali Apirine, who invented in the Stocks&Commodities August 2021 issue a new sort of bands.

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Buy&Hold? No, Buy&Sell!

There’s no doubt that buying and holding index ETFs is a long-term profitable strategy. But it has two problems. It does not reinvest profits, so the capital grows only linearly, not exponentially. And it exposes the capital to the full rollercoaster market risk. A sure way to go out of the market in a downtrend, and invest the profits back in an uptrend would be (almost) priceless. Markos Katsanos promises no less in his Stocks&Commodities July 2021 article. Does this really work? Continue reading “Buy&Hold? No, Buy&Sell!”

More Robust Strategies

The previous article dealt with John Ehlers’ AM and FM demodulating technology for separating signal and noise in price curves. In the S&C June issue he described a practical example. Applying his FM demodulator makes a strategy noticeably more robust – at least with parameter optimization.

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The Price Wave Radio

Price curves consist of much noise and little signal. For separating the latter from the former, John Ehlers proposed in the Stocks&Commodities May 2021 issue an unusual approach: Treat the price curve like a radio wave. Apply AM and FM demodulating technology for separating trade signals from the underlying noise. Continue reading “The Price Wave Radio”

Detecting Volume Breakouts

It is estimated that about 6000 different technical indicators have been meanwhile published, but few of them are based on volume. In his article in Stocks & Commodities April 2021, Markos Katsanos proposed a new indicator for detecting high-volume breakouts. And he tested it with a trading system that I believe is the most complex one ever posted on this blog.

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The Trend Persistence Indicator

Financial markets are not stationary: Price curves swing all the time between trending, mean reverting, or entirely random behavior. Without a filter for detecting trend regime, any trend following strategy will bite the dust sooner or later. In Stocks & Commodities February 2021, Richard Poster proposed a trend persistence indicator for avoiding unprofitable market periods.

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Petra on Programming: Short-Term Candle Patterns

Japanese rice merchants invented candle patterns in the eighteenth century. Some traders believe that those patterns are still valid today. But alas, it seems no one yet got rich with them. Still, trading book authors are all the time praising patterns and inventing new ones, in hope to find one pattern that is really superior to randomly entering positions. In the Stocks & Commodities January 2021 issue, Perry Kaufman presented several new candle patterns. Let’s repeat his pattern tests with major US stocks and indices, and with or without an additional trend filter. Continue reading “Petra on Programming: Short-Term Candle Patterns”

Petra on Programming: Get Rid of Noise

A major problem of indicator-based strategies is that most indicators produce more or less noisy output, resulting in false signals. The faster the indicator reacts on market situations, the noisier is it usually. In the S&C December issue, John Ehlers proposed a de-noising technology based on correlation. Compared with a lowpass filter, this method does not delay the signal. As an example, we will apply the noise elimination to Ehlers’ MyRSI indicator, a RSI variant that he presented in an earlier article. Continue reading “Petra on Programming: Get Rid of Noise”