It seems that technical analysis is a great second career for many successful people. Arthur Merrill is a well known example of someone who spent a lifetime succeeding as an engineer and finding possibly even greater success in his second career as a market technician. Dr. Humphrey Lloyd presents a similar story, with success in two professions and valuable contributions to the field of technical analysis.

Born and raised in the United Kingdom, Dr. Lloyd studied medicine there before he immigrated to the United States in 1958. He worked as a pathologist in Beverly MA from 1960 until he retired in 1997. For almost this entire time, he studied and traded the markets. In Dr. Lloyd’s own words:

I became attracted to the problems associated with investing in the stock market in the early 60s, as I identified that many similarities existed between the mental act of making a diagnosis

This code is presented as a general guide for programming and may not be 100% correct.

inputs:
AdvIssues( Close of data1 ),
DecIssues ( Close of data2 ),
AdvVol ( Close of data3 ),
DecVol ( Close of data4 ),
MBILength ( 10 ),
MBIOB ( 70 ),
MBIOS ( 45 )
;

vars:
AD ( 0 ), AD1 ( 0 ), AD2 ( 0 ), AD3 ( 0 ),
ADV ( 0 ), ADV1 ( 0 ), ADV2 ( 0 ), ADV3 ( 0 ),
TRINX ( 0 ), TRINX1 ( 0 ), TRINX2 ( 0 ), TRINX3 ( 0 ),
MBI ( 0 )
;

vars:
spacent1 (0); spacent2 (0); spacent3 (0); spacent4 (0);

AD1 = Average ( AdvIssues, MBILength );
AD2 = Average ( DecIssues, MBILength );
AD3 = ( AD1 / AD2 ) * 10 ;
AD = Round ( AD3, 1 );

ADV1 = ( AdvVol / ( AdvVol +

The November issue of Technically Speaking included an article called “The Importance of Mid-Term Year Lows” by Paul Shread, CMT. Bob Pierce offered the following insight related to that cycle:

I find the 4-year pattern to be the strongest indicator of all the ones I use. I treat it as positive for 30 months and negative for 18, rather than a basic 24:24 interpretation. I don’t know if it would be as strong handled another way. At any rate, the key here is that like any continuing pattern, it is sometimes early or late. So far, it has never skipped a cycle but that also is possible.

What caught my eye a year or so ago was that we missed the scheduled low in 2006 and didn’t get one in 2007. I have seen it early or late by a year, which is why I mention this. I went back to check

Richard Arms, a pioneer in the field of technical analysis, recently gave me the pleasure of speaking with him about his own past and the state of the markets today.

Arms has been watching the markets for quite some time now. He began his career about 50 years ago as a clerk in a brokerage firm. Over time, through knowledge, hard work, and an ability to communicate with investors, he became one of the most famous market technicians in the world.

In the early stages of his career Arms struggled to predict market activity with the tools at his disposal. In his experience, none of them seemed to work and the logic many of them didn’t make any sense to him. This led him to study technical analysis, as he identified a need to rationalize market activity and facilitate the understanding of what price movements were really implying.

After completing courses in the

If you’ve heard an increased level of distress coming from your IT Department, there’s a good chance it stems from the Options Symbology Initiative (OSI). While the transition to penny increments was a challenge, this initiative creates a new format for option symbols and a new structure for transmitting quotes and data for a variety of Options Clearing Corporation (OCC) products. These include equity and exchange-traded fund (ETF) options.

Sure equity data vendors have challenges, but a substantial number of listed equities and ETFs have options. And those options can include four to six months of expirations with a strike price list (puts & calls) that grows as volatility swings create demand at varying prices. Add the existence of dollar strikes for ETFs and the storage impact for an additional field or two for reporting becomes pretty significant.

Since many of the parties involved with the OSI process have been down this

MTA Educational Web Series – Sign Up Now

The MTA is pleased to announce the next presentations of the FREE MTA Web Series.

• Friday, March 6th, 12:00 PM EST, Ned Davis and Tim Hayes, CMT will present “Tape Indicators And Global Market Volatility.” Click here to register for this webcast.
• Wednesday, March 11th, 4:30 PM EST, Stephen Bigalow will present “The 12 Major Candlestick Signals, Providing Valuable Insights Into Price Trends.” Click here to register for this webcast.
• Tuesday, March 24th, 4:30 PM EST, Ralph Vince will present “Maximize the Probability of Being Profitable at Some Prescribed Future Point in Time.”Click here to register for this webcast.

View the Educational Web Series table below for a complete listing of webcasts that have already been scheduled into June!

CMT Exam Registration – Sign Up Now!

Desired dates,