ARTICLE SYNOPSIS ...Are There Persistent Cycles? by E. Michael Poulos Most technical indicators use a fixed lookback length based on the idea that cycles are present in the price data. Should the same fixed lookback length be used for all markets? Are there persistent cycles present to justify the use of the same lookback length for evaluating the market? Mike Poulos searches through a number of markets for persistent cycles and offers his solutions. Most technical indicators either smooth (filter) or normalize (on a scale to 0 to 100) the tradeable price in an attempt to indicate the trend direction or a trend...
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS ...Futures According To Trend Tendency by E. Michael Poulos Not all markets have the same tendency to trend. E. Michael Poulos uses his February 1991 STOCK & COMMODITIES article, ""Of trends and random walks,"" on the random walk index, which separates trends from random drifts by allowing for trend, as the basis of this article. He explains that the commodity futures you may for one reason or another assume trend strongly may not in fact. By using similar methods as previously, he produces a table of 28 commodities futures and debunks some futures assumptions -- for instance, there is a school o...
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS ...Of Trends And Random Walks by E. Michael Poulos M y distrust of the current crop of technical indicators that use fixed-length lookback intervals, with no attempt to use a price-time model, motivated me to do some research into the subject. For example, one sees chart services publishing a nine-day stochastic and/or relative strength indicator. A variety of other indicators using moving averages or the difference between moving averages also use fixed lengths. But there simply is no justification for using nine (or any other fixed number of days) as some sort of sacred number. The first six ...