The Encyclopedia of Technical Market Indicators [Hardcover]

Robert W. Colby (Author), Thomas A. Meyers (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 1988

Provides an excellent overview, and an extensively researched appraisal of over 100 technical indicators. Thoroughly documented research. Recommended as a reference to all trading and analysis software owners. Among the MANY indicators studied and discussed: -- McClellan Oscillator -- Relative Strength Index -- Williams %R -- Rate of change -- Directional movement index -- Commodity channel index -- Exponential moving average -- Demand index -- TRIN index -- Divergence analyis.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Advantages of Using Technical Market Indicators
Which to Use, How and When to Use Them, and Why

This new edition offers an accumulated treasury of nearly all known technical market indicators, including many new ones and better ways to use long-established ones. It offers precise formulas, performance over all available market history, and how to maximize reward/risk potentials. Now you can apply tested indicators immediately to your own investment decision making.

Praise for the first edition:

"Objective. Systematic. Honest. Pulls no punches. Thorough. Extensively researched. Provides in-depth coverage of more than one hundred indicators, clearly revealing both their strengths and weaknesses. Shows you how to select indicators that work best to achieve your objectives while taking the guesswork out of your investing and trading. The source for the actual facts about technical market timing indicators."­­
--Alan R. Shaw, CMT, Managing Director, Senior Advisor, Technical Research Department, Salomon Smith Barney

"The most thoroughly documented research that I have ever seen. Shows hard evidence. Highly recommended."
--­­Gerald Appel, Signalert Corporation

"Credible. Must reading."­­
--Norman G. Fosback, The Institute for Econometric Research, Inc.

"Terrific. The most helpful text."­­
--Paul Rabbitt, RabbittAnalytics.Com

The same technical market indicators used by top-performing traders and investors are available now. This book offers the necessary knowledge on how to formulate and test technical market indicators in an orderly, step-by-step fashion. Specific technical market indicator parameters shown in this book would have maximized reward/risk performance over actual market history.

Technical market indicators offer:

• Logical, practical, efficient, effective, systematic, and precisely quantified frameworks for organizing information about actual observed market behavior, providing a firm foundation for making speculative decisions, grounded on historical precedent
• Flexibility and adaptability to any time frame and any trading instrument
• Clear-cut, precise, and objective signals that allow us to confidently execute trades while eliminating uncertainty, guesswork, confusion, anxiety, and stress, and freeing us from forecasts, opinion, bias, ego, hope, greed, and fear
• A sensible and orderly procedure for selecting specific decision rules that would have maximized reward/risk performance over actual past market behavior
• Simple, intuitive, easy-to-understand, and precisely defined formulas based on a manageable number of variables, enabling us to execute decisions with the timely and disciplined consistency that is vital for success in the financial markets
• Accessibility, based on readily available technology and data
• Conservation of capital and precisely defined methods for risk control
• Risk reduction means greater consistency of profitable returns

This book shows you how to find a trading system that is right for you and how to apply it for best results­­increased profit, decreased risk, and the self-confidence of gaining control over your investment decision making.

--This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

About the Author

Robert W. Colby, CMT, is a leading authority on investing. He is widely known as an independent researcher who consults with both individual and institutional investors, and he is a featured speaker on investment research methods and the investment outlook at conferences and seminars worldwide. For his latest ongoing research, go to www.robertwcolby.com.

To further your own independent research, Robert W. Colby has arranged for your benefit a discount on the same MetaStock® technical analysis software he used for this book. Call 1-800-882-3040 and mention "Offer Code COLBY" to purchase MetaStock® at a special discount price.

--This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 581 pages
• Publisher: Business One Irwin (March 1, 1988)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1556230494
• ISBN-13: 978-1556230493
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.6 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,658,572 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

138 of 149 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Formulas are in Metastock, March 12, 2003

By 

Daevidius "Jones" (Portland, CT USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Encyclopedia Of Technical Market Indicators, Second Edition (Hardcover)

Add 2 stars if you don't care that the formulas are in Metastock shorthand, NOT in straightforward mathematical terms. I'm a programmer, looking for a book with the straight formulas for technical indicators. Here's what it says on the book, as quoted by amazon: "Simple, intuitive, easy-to-understand, and precisely defined formulas". Sounds great, so I buy it. NOWHERE does it mention that these formulas are in Metastock shorthand, which is NOT decipherable without Metastock, so I returned it. The book is very good at explaining the use of these indicators, but I'm very disappointed in the misleading marketing of the publishers and amazon.

46 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Indicator formulas are not in Metastock, only some trading sytems are, May 22, 2006

By 

tola (Vantaa, Finland) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Encyclopedia Of Technical Market Indicators, Second Edition (Hardcover)

For the earlier review commenting that the formulas are only in Metastock I must comment that this is not the case.

The indicators in the book are described in varying ways:
1. Most of the indicators (and the method of their calculation) are described in prose. Sometimes there are no mathematical formulas visible, as the calculation is only described in the text.
2. Very often the mathematical formula for the indicator is printed out. From these formulas it is quite straightforward to implement them in your selected calculator (be it in your head, Excel, any programming language..)
3. For the most used and known indicators, the calculation is layed out in detail with printed step-by-step excel-sheets. For example, it is impossible for you not to undestand from the book how to calculate Exponential Moving Averages.

However, the book does not only include definitions about market indicators, but also examples of their implementation. For most of the indicators a trading system is proposed (that is, exact rules when to buy or sell using the data given by the indicator), and the implementation of these systems are indeed described in Metastock language. Still the described systems are quite easy to understand even without Metastock background. The meaning of some of the metastock function calls may take some figuring out, but usually given the context of the text the code is quite easy to understand. Personally I am also a programmer and have never used Metastock, and still find all of the book most usable.

The only negative aspect of the book I can say is that the level of description on the indicators varies quite widly. Some indicators may get several pages, while others are passed by with 10 lines of text. It would have been nice if all the indicators would have been given the same level of treatment, with at least simple mathematical descrioption for each. I usually prefer simple mathematics, and it was little disturbing to notice that sometimes formulas are described only in text.

To conclude, this is after all a very comprehensive book, and by far the best collection of data on market indicators I have seen. Highly recommended dependless whether you are using metastock or not.

32 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Focuses too much on indicator performance, December 31, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: The Encyclopedia Of Technical Market Indicators, Second Edition (Hardcover)

This is a big fat book that devotes most of its pages to an analysis of how each indicator performs when used as a sole trading strategy. Less emphasis is given to the detailed, objective, comprehensive and comparative explanation of each indicator along with its intended usage, pitfalls etc. The book does contain some of this latter information here and there --- but not in a comparative and structured way. You'll only find a page or two devoted to the fundamental explanation of the indicator, in contrast to many more pages devoted to how it performs relative to buy-and-hold and other strategies.