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Strategies & Market Trends : TA Science Projects & Experimental Indicators -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: big run who wrote (34)	1/27/1998 11:51:00 PM
From: ftth	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 237

Hi Mike, do you know of a link to the definition of Zig-Zag. All I can find is that RTR systems devised something called zigzag, and an indicator called zigzag, but not necessarily the same thing, is talked about in Art Merrill's Filtered Waves book. I have noticed one thing--metastock isn't interpreting any of the zigzag values after the last reaction point. It draws the line, and I can read the values with the data tool, but they dont pass in the code for some reason. The values are kind of bogus anyways for the last leg because there's no true endpoint. I'll try and figure an alternative, and user programmable, way of tagging reaction points, but I think metastock's programming language is too thin to do this. Ideally, I think I'd like to base it on reversing some number of closes (user programmable), like 2 or 3, to tag a point as a reversal. I think that's a better indicator of a real reversal than an arbitrary percentage or number of points. Perhaps, like you say, a volatility band or crossover would work well. Lot's of stuff to experiment with. dh

To: big run who wrote (34)	2/3/1998 11:07:00 PM
From: ftth	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 237

Hi Mike, a while back you posted: <<the use of the zig zag indicator to mark pivot points could prove to be disasterous as it can change its previous numbers unlike other indicators.>> Try as I might, I haven't been able to recreate the changing numbers problem. Were you referring to just the data after the final pivot point? If you could elaborate a little, I'd appreciate it because I'm finding Metastock's "programming language" isn't powerful enough to do much, so I might be stuck using zigzag for the Trend Volume indicator. MetaStock needs array and pointer support! Unfortunately, the zigzag "descriptions" I've looked at are just "fluff" descriptions. I'd like to find equations so there can be no question of what it does. Most of the book TA from A-Z is fluff--few explicit equations (probably for copyright reasons and space reasons). A very good introductory book, but my copy mainly collects dust. My interpretation of how to implement the zigzag--based on a text description--isn't implementable in MetaStock. Could do it in Excel, but that's not real practical if I want to backtest a bunch of data. If you have an explicit definition of z/z, do tell! dh