ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...""Stopping"" A System by John Sweeney Once you get hold of an idea, it's often tough to get rid of it, especially if it shows no promise whatever. It tugs at the back of the mind--what was it about the original insight? What was valid? What was bogus? I
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...Applying Moving Averages by John Sweeney The moving average, one of the first technical methods that novice traders study, can be applied to your favorite markets. Here are its strengths and weaknesses. It's commonplace to honor simplicity but to simu
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...Average Behavior by John Sweeney Let me speculate a little here. I know from experience that the half-cycle moving average generally runs along the tops of declining trends and along the bottoms of rising trends Ñ at least in the financials I follow. Th
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...BOOK REVIEW: Commodity Market Money Management by John Sweeney Commodity Market Money Management by Fred Gehm John Wiley & Sons, 1983 One Wiley Drive Somerset, New Jersey. Price: $37.95 There are really two sides to trading: the idea and the execut
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...Back To Averages by John Sweeney Getting back to the subject of averages skimming tops and bottoms of price curves (Settlement, STOCKS & COMMODITIES, February 1991), two readers, C. Skelley of Tucson, AZ, and John Ehlers of Goleta, CA, wrote to explain
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...Book Review: by John Sweeney An Easy Course in Using the HP-12C and Other Financial Calculators by Chris Coffin and Ted Wadman Grapevine Publications, Inc. Corvallis, Oregon 97339 Price: $18.00 There seems to be something about financial calculatio
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...Breaking Out Of The Trading Range by John Sweeney Some blessed day, after being mired in a trading range for two years, your market is going to finally go into a trend. You must be there when it does, not trading something else or, worse, ignoring it fr
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...Developing A System by John Sweeney The great thing about many of the new trading support systems is that they facilitate the respectable practice of ""dinking around"": that process of tweaking every crazy idea that strikes one until something producti
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...Developing An Edge by John Sweeney Once you've developed something with an edge on the market, it's only natural to want to exploit it mercilessly, making hay while the sun shineth, so to speak. The simplest way I know to do this is to add more position
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...Financial Futures by John Sweeney When you're on top, don't believe it. There's nothing like winning to upset your equilibrium. You can win--and still lose. This article is a blow-by-blow account of two trades that were unrelated but, through me, manage
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...Fourier Analyses by John Sweeney One of the fascinating ideas that came up early in STOCKS & COMMODITIES' days was the Fourier analyses applied to stock and commodity data by Anthony Warren and Jack Hutson (see Technical Analysis of STOCKS & COMMODITIES
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...Interview: Bob Farrell by John Sweeney Probably no one has seen the big picture of technical analysis' growth and increasing legitimacy quite the way that Bob Farrell, a fixture at bellwether brokerage Merrill Lynch for nearly half a century, has. He se
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...Interview: Carol Osler by John Sweeney Hidden away in the Federal Reserve System are entire departments of economists researching nearly every aspect of US business. In late 2000, we picked up hints of an economist who had actually taken on the definiti
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...On The Opening Bell - David Vomund Of AIQ David Vomund of AIQ Systems wears a few hats, chief of which is his positions as chief analyst of artificial intelligence?based charting software developer AIQ Systems and the editor of AIQ's newsletter, The Ope
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...V.18:10 (80-95):Interview:Gary B.Smith Of TheStreet.com by John Sweeney Trader, author, and TV personality Gary B.Smith trades for a living and has done so since splitting with Sports Illustrated, where he covered pro golf. More prominently, Gary writes
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...From Sun Up To Sun Down Interview: Investing Champion Mark Cook by John Sweeney Mark D. Cook first won fame as a trader in 1989 when he finished second in the US Investing Championship. By 1992, he had shifted to options and racked up large three-digit
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...Interview: J. Doyne Farmer by John Sweeney The number of physicists and engineers who have dented their axes on market prediction is so vast that it led to the derisive term "quant." But who are these guys, and what are they up to? We tracked down one m
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...On The Alliance Of Exchanges Leo Melamed As chief architect of financial futures, Melamed led the US futures industry from 1967 until his retirement from the CME in 1991. During this period, financial futures experienced unparalleled growth and became a
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...Faster, Cheaper, Better? Matthew Andresen Of Island ECN Matthew Andresen has been serving as president of Island ECN , Inc., since 1998. Since then, Andresen has spearheaded IslandÕs explosive growth and overseen its role in shaping the new electronic
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...Interview: Nassim N. Taleb by John Sweeney Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a quantitative trader operating at the intersection of theory and practice. Currently president and head trader at Empirica Capital LLC, a hedge fund operator in Greenwich, CT, and adju
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...When Institutional Investor (II) magazine recently named its All-America Fixed-Income Technical Analysis Team, STOCKS & COMMODITIES Contributing Editor Alex Saitta was in first place. We thought a roundtable interview of the top three would be not only a
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...The Grand Old Man Technician Walter Deemer Walt Deemer began his Wall Street career in 1963 as a Merrill Lynch research trainee. Since then, he has seen the ebb and flow of Wall Street through booms and busts, spending time with the Manhattan Fund in th
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...Interview: The Survivors by John Sweeney and Jayanthi Gopalakrishnan As goes the Nasdaq, so does the number of daytraders. Or so it seems. Those who continue to trade as if nothing changed are those who can call themselves, with confidence, traders. For
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...Trade The Future(s) Tom Rietz Of Iowa Electronic Markets Iowa Electronic Markets (IEM) are real-money futures markets in which students and professionals trade contracts of everything from US politics to Federal Reserve monetary policy to computer retur
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...Music of the Markets - Victor B. Niederhoffer Trader, speculator, author, and more. The name may be familiar, but there's more to the man than just finance. Victor Niederhoffer has served as advisor to, and investor for, famed investor George Soros and
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...Interview: Yale Hirsch: Market Historian by John Sweeney Yale Hirsch is best known as the editor and publisher of The Stock Trader's Almanac, now in its 33rd annual edition. He is a stock market historian and stock analyst who could probably tell you, w
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...Tales Of Professional Daytraders Bob And Don Bright Of Bright Trading Bored in retirement from exploiting the Standard & PoorÕs OEX options spreads, Bob Bright got back into trading in 1992 by forming Bright Trading with partner Edward Franco as an off-
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...Richard McCabe Of Merrill Lynch The Technical Tradition Continues Continuing the technical tradition begun by Bob Farrell, Merrill Lynch chief market analyst Richard McCabe has been Mr.Technical Analysis at the world's largest brokerage since 1993, fol
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...MMS-Technical Research Money Market Services on Telerate by John Sweeney MMS -Technical Research Money Market Services on Telerate 490 El Camino Real Belmont, CA 94002 (800)227-7304 (415)595-0610 Price: $145 per month on already installed Telerate
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...Marshall wave theory by John Sweeney Yet another ""wave"" is being added to the futures lexicon: the Marshall Wave. Originated by John Marshall (Box 2302, Naples, FL33939 (813) 263-3114. Marshall Wave is a complicated system for trading futures in heavi
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...NOVICE SPECULATOR: An Anti-COMMODEX System by John Sweeney One observation I made when starting technical analysis was that there were relatively few bits of data to work with: price, volume, and open interest for a given futures contract and its relate
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...NOVICE SPECULATOR: My First System by John Sweeney As a novice trader, newly equipped with a price monitor, personal computer, and a fresh reading of Kaufman's Commodity Trading Systems and Methods, I was looking for some steady money in day-trading. In
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...Novice Speculator by John Sweeney Bill Wyckoff suggested I write this--not personally, of course, since he's long out of print. He just noted in Wall Street Ventures and Adventures Through Forty Years that writing and publishing The Ticker was a terrific
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...Novice Speculator Trading Plan by John Sweeney When all the waiting is done and a new trade is signaled I can at last, get to work. However, it's not to burn up the wires to Chicago -- it's paperwork that needs to be done, before the job even starts! Ac
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...It's been around forever, and it's a tried-and-true favorite. It's also the source of great frustration. How can anything end up as both? Here are the basics for using moving averages to identify the trend in the market. No technique is more frequently
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...The on-balance volume indicator is a technical tool that traders use to determine the trend of volume. Here are the basics. The interplay of price and volume is the combination that is most discussed in traditional technical analysis. In these discussio
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...Here's a look at the parabolic trading system, with details on the way it works and how it's calculated. by John Sweeney Few books have produced as many indicators of lasting value as J. Welles Wilder's New Concepts in Technical Trading Sys-tems. From
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...Brokerages: The Next Generation Philip Berber Of CyBerCorp Before Philip Berber formed CyBerCorp, a next-generation, electronic brokerage group providing real-time, direct-access trading, and Internet execution technology, he had already made a name fo
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...Quantifying The Tried And True by John Sweeney Some people think that my use of numbers indicates a lack of respect for traditional charting techniques. Quite the opposite is true. I've found over the years that what I've come up with generally confirms
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...Returning To The Basics by John Sweeney Since November last year, I've gone through exploiting the trend-related activities -- trading the underlying trend, adding trades to the trend trades and reversing trades when wrong about the trend -- but there's t
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...Reversing For Dollars by John Sweeney Harebra ined ideas bein g a plentiful ite m in my daydreams, the idea tha t I mentione d in April's Settlement tha t I implement a n automa tic reversin g tra de at my maximum a dverse excursion ( MAE) stop point ha
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...Reversing Your Losses by John Sweeney Last month, Settlement closed with some incomplete work: the profit and loss charts for trades added onto the underlying system that was developed in the months prior. To finish the subject of evaluating add-on trad
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...SWEENEY AGONISTES by John Sweeney OUR APPROACH - Believe it or not, there is method to our madness in publishing articles. Two series of articles going on right now are laying the groundwork for much more rigorous technical systems. Clifford Sherry's a
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...SWEENEY AGONISTES by John Sweeney I must start off this issue with an apology. In the November 1986 issue, Frank Tarkany published evidence of non-randomness and serial dependence in Dow Jones prices. The Figure 7 we published, which estimated the tradi
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...Shelly Natenberg: trader and teacher by John Sweeney Shelly Natenberg, a floor trader at the Chicago Board of Trade, is the author of Options Volatility & Pricing Strategies, Probus Publishing, Chicago, 118 North Clinton St, Chicago, IL 60606, (800) 426
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...Shifting To Another Dimension by John Sweeney I have spent the last several months tweaking a simple trading system to provide good profits with minimal drawdowns. The underlying idea (""Settlement,"" November 1991 through February 1992) isn't too compl
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...Sweeney Agonistes by John Sweeney FEEDING FRENZY I opened my Journal today to find Kidder Peabody explaining ""What is a stock?"" on the editorial pages. My mother calls to find out if she should be going for ""higher returns in the market."" I've not
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...Technical Analysis of the Futures Markets by John Sweeney Author: John J. Murphy Publisher: New York Institute of Finance 70 Pine Street New York, NY 10270 (212) 344-2900 Price: $45 plus $2 shipping (U.S. only) Mr. Technician, John Murphy, has writt
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...Testing Trading Rules Over Different Time Periods by John Sweeney After two Sundays of dinking around (Settlement, STOCKS & COMMODITIES November and December 1991), I'd finally converted a chance idea to something with remotely promising prospects somet
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...THE ADX The calculation of the average directional movement (ADX) indicator is built on the intuitive notion that a trend is a series of price ranges extending in a consistent direction. In sidebar Figure 1, example A, the second day's trading range is
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...The Baby Bulge Begins by John Sweeney Our Technical Editor opines about the demographic effect the baby boomer generation is having on the stock market. Is 38% of the value in the market unaccountable? What could explain such a discrepancy? Goldman, S
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...The Professional Option Trader's Manual by John Sweeney Author: David L. Caplan Publisher: Opportunities in Options P.O. Box 2126 Malibu, CA, 90265 Price: $70 (or $150 with a three-month subscription to Opportunities in Options) Despite its name, thi
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...Here, one of the most popular indicators found in most analytical software packages is explained. When the relative strength index (RSI) became popular in the 1980s, it was touted as the indicator that led every turn in the market. Indeed, for certain f
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...The Skimming Discussion Continues by John Sweeney Remember the moving average ""skimming"" discussion that's gone on over the last several issues? I received another cogent letter describing the effect for a half-wave moving average. Amos Newcombe of Ma
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...Designing a profitable trading system is key, but the way that profits and losses vary can have an impact on your long-term success. In my previous article, I wrote that, other things being equal, a trading system with lower volatility would triumph ov
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...Trading Back Into A Range by John Sweeney Last month in Settlement, I wrote briefly about some simple ideas for defining nontrending periods. Although exotic approaches are possible, simple things are easier to teach to computer packages. The program I'
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...Trading Ranges With Moving Averages by John Sweeney Using simple moving averages may seem like a straightforward approach to trading, but there are subtle techniques that can improve performance. A few months ago, I pointed out that moving averages ar
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...Trading Simply: Minimizing Losses by John Sweeney Richard Dennis is said to have said, ""There's a lot less to trading than meets the eye."" If so, he was correct. I like to describe an approach that has nothing to do with entry or exit, but everything
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...Trading Tactics A livestock futures anthology by John Sweeney Editor: Todd Lofton Publisher: Chicago Mercantile Exchange Agricultural Commodity Marketing 30 South Wacker Drive Chicago, IL 60606 (312) 930-8213 (direct line to order the book) Price: $29.9
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...Trading The Deutschemark's Gaps by John Sweeney Talk about humiliation! Looking at a Deutschemark chart, I figured I'd trade with the direction of any gap for short small gains. The evidence showed I was 180 degrees wrong! I asked my computer to look at
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...Using Maximum Adverse Excursions for stops by John Sweeney So often the key to success is the reverse of what we initially perceive. Young basketball players are fascinated with the shot, never suspecting the game is won with fast feet. Traders focus on
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...Van K. Tharp, Ph.D.: Trader's Psychologist by John Sweeney In purely technical terms, Van K. Tharp is a psychological researcher and counselor specializing in neurolinguistic programming. In the lay language of his clients, he's the specialist who helps
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...Volatility Of Returns by John Sweeney Designing a profitable trading system is key, but the way that profits and losses vary can have an impact on your long-term success. Here's why looking at how the returns deviate can help you design your own system.
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...CF-DM from J.C. Productions. By John Sweeney Some systems are so active it could give a guy a heart attack. J.C. Productions has put together one of the most active and breathtaking trading systems I've run across. Of course, I haven't seen everything i
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...What Is A Trend, Anyway? by John Sweeney A reader reacting to the Settlement article in January on trading basics (Settlement, ""Trading simply: Minimizing losses,"" Stocks & COMMODITIES, January 1991) asked a key question: What is a trend? How do I ide
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...Where to Put Your Stops by John Sweeney Stops protecting an initial entry position are like forward passes in football: Three things can happen to you and only one of them is good! 1)You can be taken out of a strong adverse move early (That's good). 2
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS...Winning on Wall Street by John Sweeney Author: Martin Zweig Publisher: Warner Books 666 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10103 Price: $20 This is a good book. It has a very reasonable approach to trading the market, or even individual stocks. It's a compe