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Technology Stocks : JDS Uniphase (JDSU) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: waverider who wrote (2480)	12/2/1999 11:20:00 AM
From: Guy Gordon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24042

RE: Picking a moving average. It's a valid criticism of TA. If you can pick any period MA you want, how can you know that you aren't just fooling yourself? The proper way to answer the question is to try many different periods, and measure the performance of each as an indicator. This should be done for each stock. In practice, this is too hard. So people use a few standards. 26, 50, and 200-day periods for moving averages are those standards. This works only because what TA "measures" is really just crowd psychology. There's no physical force pulling a stock back to those moving averages, or bouncing the stock off of them. It's just lots of investors & traders deciding to buy and sell based on them. (Sorry to give such a serious answer to a humorous post.)