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Strategies & Market Trends : Rolling Averages, Their ins and outs and ups and downs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: nasdaqian who wrote (11)	12/29/1999 11:55:00 AM
From: Drygulch Dan	Respond to of 31

Good point. The tools lots of times make things look different. I use Telescan charting service. They basically offer three time ranges on charts. When I download a chart, I can click on one of three buttons. Each button corresponds to three chart ranges. 6 month, 1 year, really long (length varies with security on this one.). Once the graph is down loaded, I have a capability to apply whatever sets of up to three MAs to it, and vary these as a set between arithmetic and exponential. So the six month chart only contains data spanning the last 6 months, one year chart contains a years worth of daily data, while the long term chart contains really long amounts of data out to about 20 years but each data point represents about four weeks data, each data point is a bar representing high, and low limits, plus the last. So I download all three normally for each stock I am going to examine. Then I fiddle with combinations of MAs on each of these. For instance on the 6 month chart, I might start with 2/4/8 and if its too busy or doesn't show anything clearly, I might switch to say 5/10/20. The units of the basic graph are days and the units of the MAs are days, Same with the one year chart. The long term chart has units of about 28 days for the basic graph, and I don't really know what the units for its MAs are. The MA generator is an overlay that is locally applied on the PC display after the download. While the source graph is provided by the service at the time of the download. Of course these can then be saved locally for future reference. I pay about 9 or 10 bucks a month for this service. I discipline myself to limit download times to about 2 or 3 minutes a day. They charge by the minute. Each download session starts with a 2 minute minimum, sort of like a taxi cab minimum. I can usually download all the charts I want to look at in any given day in those first 2 minutes. Comparing to your charting, its like I have two views of the daily data - 6 months and 1 year, and one long term view of the monthly data.

To: nasdaqian who wrote (11)	12/29/1999 5:29:00 PM
From: Drygulch Dan	Respond to of 31

I've emailed Telescan asking for clarification on their long term chart rolling average units. Maybe that will clear things up also. Now I'm confused.

To: nasdaqian who wrote (11)	12/30/1999 12:08:00 PM
From: Drygulch Dan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 31

While we are at a quiet moment, have you ever thought about this ? Since a moving average is comprised of historical information stretching back through many days, then it follows that future moving average data points are quite well bounded with an increasing degree of uncertainty. Given that stock prices move incrementally for the most part, discounting the rare dramatic breaks for the time being, one could project tomorrow's and future moving average data points to some lessening degree of certainty as one projects out in future time. I've never seen any formal work done on this as a potential TA tool. I've done some myself and think this is a pretty cool concept. After all the past is history, and the future is generally considered unknowable. But certain aspects about the future for instance the sun's rising tomorrow, tax day coming next April 15th, the seasonal change, microsoft will dominate the earth, etc are indeed knowable. Add to this list, tomorrow's rolling averages are things we can peer hazily into the future to see.