Indicators and Timeframes

MarketSci has a short post on what they consider long, intermediate, and short term indicators and strategies. Most indicators can vary sampling periods in order to smooth them out to avoid false alarms. As indicated by MarketSci, the relevancy of different indicators does depend on the amount of data as well as the timeframe. However, with the advent of practical high-frequency data, it is no longer the case that smaller time frames necessarily implies sparser data. One could certainly be sampling weekly for a multi-year indicator and end up with less data than sampling ticks for a few minutes in high-frequency data. The guidelines seem to be that long-term is ruled by trend-following (e.g., moving averages), intermediate-term by mean reversion, and short-term by "noise" (their example is RSI).

Writer's Market

A couple of days ago, I encounter 2012 Writer's Market Deluxe Edition (Writer's Market Online) at a neighborhood bookstore. The book contained a catalog of freelancing opportunities in a wide assortment of magazines and journals. What I found interesting was that financial and technology freelancers did not receive an appreciably higher rate than other areas. There were certainly exceptions, but for the most part, there was no real discrepancy between rates in different fields. The main trading-oriented publication the book listed was www.traders.com (Technical Analysis, Inc., publisher of Stock and Commodities, Working Money, and Traders.com Advantage magazines), where freelancers apparently contribute a good deal of the articles.

According to the Editorial Guidelines, the top 5 hot topics are relative strength indicator (RSI), average directional movement rating (ADXR), Fibonacci ratios, MACD and moving averages, and volume trends. I am a bit surprised to see RSI so prominent. In contrast, stochastics and chart reading are much further down on the list.