In the olden days charts were kept by hand. Graph paper was usually white, though sometimes pale green was preferred as it is said to be easier on the eye. Sharpened pencils at the ready the working day started and […]

School’s out for summer and for once the pound is stronger against the euro. This becomes immediately apparent as you walk past the bureau de change along the high street but the question is whether it’s the euro’s fault (and […]

The summer sales are in full swing on the UK High Street, red banners proclaiming savings of 20, 40 and up to 70 per cent off the original retail price. Having become used to year-round promotions, become cynical about marketing […]

Founder member of the STA Philip Gray treated us to a no-holds-barred look into manias and the madness of crowds last night. Warning us: ‘this lecture will seriously damage your wealth’ he regaled us with interesting, and many hilarious anecdotes […]

There are many rules of thumb involving market moves and the size of these; a ten per cent stock market decline is called a correction and 20 per cent drop a bear market. But what can we conclude when markets […]

How many roll up their sleeves in a hurry, study the price chart of their favourite financial instrument, using the same old methods and time frame, all the time. When questioned, the usual retort is that this is their preferred […]

With the British summer social season at full tilt – Queen’s and Ascot this week, Chelsea and Epsom earlier – I was thinking of how this affects markets. Personally I have never been a great one for cycles, agricultural, Fibonacci […]

So said Dr Keith Anderson yesterday at the STA’s monthly meeting in London. An interesting talk based on lectures given to third year students in finance at York University – and it showed. Perfect timing, good clear slides, lots of […]

This week the euro rallied five US cents in 65 hours, despite on-going Greek drama, and all too many financial analysts were stumped, slaughtered, and lost for words. I have been wondering whether technical analysis can help in predicting surprise, […]

In a week where the Shanghai Composite Index lost 10 per cent of face value in just two days, cries of ‘tears’, and ‘I told you so’ abound. There is also an element of schadenfreude as these same writers didn’t […]

In a week when Britain saw deflation for the first time in 55 years, and too many European government bonds yield less than nothing, one begins to question one’s sanity in this topsy turvy world. It set me thinking about […]

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 […]

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 […]

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.