Chart Your Way to Profits: The Online Trader's Guide to Technical Analysis with ProphetCharts, Second Edition

Chapter 6. Indicators in Action

In the world of charting, the most basic way to look at a stock (or any other financial entity) is with the price data. The prices make up the trends and patterns of value as it moves through time, and there is a great deal that can be learned and predicted based on price movement.

However, there is another deeper way to look at this price movement, and that is with the use of technical indicators. An indicator is essentially an embellishment on the graph derived from price and/or volume data. This embellishment might take the form of up-arrows, down-arrows, a line graph overlaid on top of a price graph, a histogram, or any of many other forms.

There are literally hundreds of indicators that have been created. ProphetCharts provides access to nearly 200 of these. And many of these indicators can themselves provide different parameters and tweaks to their settings. So the number of possible indicators at your disposal theoretically is in the hundreds of thousands.

The purpose of this chapter is not to delve into each and every possible indicator. There are far too many, and there are many excellent books already written about the specifics of these indicators. Instead, this chapter provides you a basis for understanding the philosophy behind indicators, highlighting a small sample to help you understand the reasoning. It also has the purpose of showing you how, within ProphetCharts, to access these indicators.

SINGLE VERSUS MULTIPLE INDICATORS

Indicators ...