Price and Other Indicators

An Indicator is an abstraction of historical price data which is used to gain insight into the stock or market behavior.   Examples of popular technical indicators are Moving Averages, Bollinger Bands, MACD lines and histogram, RSI, Stochastic Oscillator.

Stockcharts.com has a good comprehensive definition of technical indicators.

Extra Insight:

Indicators describe past market action in a way that can be calculated by computer.   We can objectively define trading signals in terms of the indicators.  For example, we could define a buy signal as the stock price increasing above a moving average.

Its also possible to use indicators subjectively, but that greatly diminishes their value (IMHO).

Backtesting checks market action subsequent to an indicator’s signal.  Backtesting a large number of stocks over a large time period gives insight into how the indicator performed in the past.   Backtesting can only be done with objective rules for evaluating an indicator.

Even an indicator that tested well in the past may not perform well in the future — there are no guarantees.

An objectively defined indicator can help a trader make crisp decisions and trade by a system of rules rather than be ruled by emotion.

Updated: 11/12/08.

Tags: backtesting, data, indicator, macdh, rsi, stochastic, system, technical, trading

I start this blog while immersed in the early phases of my fourth major US stock market backtesting effort. 

The purpose of the blog is to record my key decisions and tactics for backtesting.   I intend it to be a resource for traders and active investors . I hope that others will learn from my efforts and we all learn from each others’ comments and discussion.

My goals for backtesting are:

1. Design trading strategies for my own use.   Specifically, 

• US Stock Market
• both buying long and short selling 
• investigate both trend following and band trading  
• swing trading: end-of-day (EOD) or daily charts and trades that last several weeks  

2. Provide information that other traders can use to develop their own systems.    That includes the areas above, and in addition, I want to illustrate for new traders such key concepts as:

• stop loss orders 
• market orders vs limit orders vs stop entry orders
• trailing stops
• price targets
• indicators like moving average, RSI, MACDH, Stochastic

3. Do this with a scope and scale that goes beyond the resources typically available to private traders, including:

• delisted stocks
• over 15 years of historical data
• clean database
• multiple time periods to avoid curve fitting
• crude and robust strategies only…limited fussing with parameters
• statistically sound methodologies
• monte carlo simulations to generalize beyond the given data

 Let’s dive in!

(Backtesting Blog is an Amazon Associate.)

Tags: backtesting, data, goals, limit order, macdh, market order, rsi, stochastic, stop loss, swing trading