Novice Traders' Notebook  |  JUN 1997

Playing TRIX: The Triple Exponential Smoothing Oscillator by Joe Luisi

Playing TRIX: The Triple Exponential Smoothing Oscillator by Joe Luisi Here's a look at a tried-and-true favorite, an oscillator that traders can use to determine the trend of the market. With each technical analysis software package comes a host of technical indicators, yet more often than not, the manual accompanying the package only provides a series of one-page guidelines describing how to use each indicator. So here’s a more in-depth look at a particular indicator that’s often found in those packages, one that for the most part is overlooked but has a real use for the technician: The triple exponential smoothing oscillator (TRIX). The value of TRIX as an oscillator lies in that it is a leading indicator, whereas other technical tools are generally lagging indicators. TRIX leads a market because it uses a differencing function —after smoothing the data to reduce the impact of noise around the trend, the difference between each day’s smoothed version of the closing prices is measured.

by Joe Luisi