Gerry Celaya, describing himself as a small Aberdeenshire sheep farmer, addressed the STA at May’s monthly meeting yesterday. Needless to say Gerry, who used to be a board member of the Society, is no ordinary farmer with a BA and […]

Walking back from my local polling station today, determined to say my piece in the most unusual and unpredictable British election in living memory, I started thinking about opinion polls. Dictionary definitions of ‘poll’ include: The process of voting in […]

Once upon a time life was easy. If you were a ‘good’ person you saved money, deposited at a bank that you trusted, it would earn interest and then, with a bit of luck, you could buy the big-ticket item […]

The Technical Analyst Awards ceremony was held last Thursday night for the seventh year running at Le Meriden Piccadilly. Several well known people from the industry were there, including Axel Rudolph, chairman of the STA, Deborah Owen, head of education, […]

Media wants attention and like any spoilt child, the beast will do anything to get it. So business headlines scream at us with emotive words like ‘slump’, ‘soar’, ‘crisis’ and ‘opportunity’. It’s difficult not to get swept up in it […]

Famous Belgians are as rare as hen’s teeth, so we are being a little facetious here. His excellent, well-timed talk, with clear slides, on a challenging subject, this Namur resident Julien Camberlin (MFTA, CFTe and CEWA Level 1) was ‘worth […]

Sometimes, only rarely, does one come across something that is, as the kids would say, ‘awesome’. Being a visual sort of person, which I think most technical analysts must be, I recently came across this site and it reminded me […]

Roll up! Sign up! Don’t be frightened by all the big blokes. This really is a fun run which raises money for Cancer Research UK. For the first time ever the STA has entered a team, one of hundreds of […]

You will have probably heard of the great new technological leap forward that is the ability to print in three dimensions. Not only will we eventually be able to make body part replacements, but I have been warned that the […]

Trading the wholesale markets for the last 35 years, I have been thinking about the changes I have seen.

Most obvious of course is technology, the advent of computing power revolutionising the way we technical analysts work, the quantity of data we can deal with, and the choices we have available to us. Not forgetting search engines so that we can quickly double-check details we have forgotten and theories we are a bit flaky on. I find Wikipedia and StockCharts.com invaluable when unsure of which parameter is the default for a particular analysis – and so on.

A long, long, time ago, I can still remember – when moving averages were plain and simple. Nothing weighted or exponential, dynamic or otherwise (nowadays considered moribund perhaps). Traders used to use 10 and 20 day moving average crossovers to generate buy and sell signals; fund managers, who had time on their side, opted for 50 and 200 day ones, again only crossovers.

Only economists use line charts.  We technical analysts have developed far more sophisticated methods, first bar charts, then bar charts with opening and closing levels which morphed into candlesticks, not forgetting those with no time scale along the bottom like Point & Figure, Renko, and the Japanese Three Line Break.