Podcast
In this episode, I look at basic technical tools that anyone, regardless of background or previous experience, can use to enhance his or her trading program. Important concepts and tools are covered, along with some ideas for how to expand your learning and learn to do this yourself. Technicals vs
Trading tools
My goal was to put simple, but powerful, tools into your hands so you can start doing the work to understand how the market moves. In this, the last, post in the series, I will do two things. First, we'll wrap up some unfinished business from yesterday'
Trading tools
So this is what we've been waiting for. We finally have the tools to ask simple market questions and to ask some critical questions. If you are new to backtesting, please go back to the beginning and work through the posts carefully. This is a learning process and
General Comments
We, all of us, tend to be overconfident and make too many assumptions. Consider this case: a few years ago, it seemed the TA landscape was swept with the idea of trading failed patterns. There was a lot of hype about trading patterns in which traders were trapped and had
Trading tools
Pat yourself on the back if you've come this far in the little backtesting mini-course. After many posts, we've basically gotten data into a spreadsheet and calculated some moving averages. You probably aren't blown away by what we've accomplished, but think again:
Technical Patterns
A few months ago I wrote a post on a certain kind of trending pattern I have called "slide along the bands." This pattern is characterized by a market that pushes into either the upper or lower Keltner channel, and trends against that channel with relatively few pullbacks.
Trading tools
Continuing on with the short series on backtesting in Excel, let's look at some tools to visualize data and make some simple calculations. Excel is a good tool for quick and dirty data visualization in some cases--basic Excel graphs can be made quickly and show the relationships between
General Comments
If you've been following along with the short Excel course, you've created a spreadsheet using SPY daily data, and added daily TLT data to the sheet in another column. I received a few questions about why we needed to match the two series with a VLOOKUP
Nested Pullback
Patterns are important in trading; you might even say that trading is basically a game of recognizing the right patterns and doing the right thing when they happen. Most of you who have read my blog or my book, or have seen the research I write every day, know that
General Comments
Today, we will add another data series to our file we created yesterday that had daily SPY data in it. It's not quite as simple as pasting the new data into the sheet; we need to make sure they line up correctly. Tomorrow, we will take a little
Trading tools
Continuing from yesterday's post, let's roll up our sleeves and get into the process of managing data in Excel. The purpose of this short series of posts is to give you tools to look into the market's motions and begin to tease out some
Trading tools
I've received many questions about how to do basic backtesting in Excel. I think I wrote in my book that we all have a love/hate relationship with Excel: it's a good way to do some quick and dirty tests, it is on practically every computer