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Biotech / Medical : IMNR - Immune Response -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MJ who wrote (1259)	1/26/1999 10:08:00 AM
From: John S. Baker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1510

Off topic ... and long ... regarding On Balance Volume and other technical indicators. I, too, like to watch the constant battle between supply and demand as it plays out, hopefully before being reflected in a stock's price. And there are sites which plot some of these indicators automatically for us so that we no longer need to do it with paper and pencil (partial list below). On Balance Volume (OBV) certainly is one effective way of looking at this. IMHO, though, OBV has a limitation in that everything is determined by the price of the first and last trades of the day, and often there is significant information hidden within the intraday info. Based on OBV, IMNR has been under distribution since $13 in early November ... although the OBV has not dropped down as far as it was in August 1998. My personal preference is Money Flow Indicator, similar to OBV except that the calculation is made for every trade during the day. This helps to unmask Market Maker games and is more useful to me. Several sites specifically compute MFI. The nicest hints by MFI are when it goes up while the stock stays steady (early accumulation) or even goes down (buying opportunity). Based on MFI, IMNR was under serious accumulation from mid-August at $10 ... including a buying opportunity at $8-9 ... until mid-December at $12-14. But since then, there has been a significant MFI drop, indicating distribution. There is another indicator which is called (I think) ADI, for Accumulation-Distribution Index. This attempts to track only large-volume trades (often linked with institutions or other "major players"). It sets a minimum threshhold for the size of trade which will be considered. All trades below that minimum size are ignored, and then an "MFI-like" computation is made for the remainder. I do not know of any site which does this automatically, but I made a spread sheet program which uses an input of the daily tick information plus threshhold size and produces the ADI value for that day. These can then be plotted manually. I do not maintain a ADI plot for IMNR. Check out some of these sites which will do much of the tedious plotting work for you. iqc.com (computes OBV and several other indicators for various periods of time) Here is a sample of another chart, showing MFI over 12 months. bigcharts.com This is at www.bigcharts ... select interactive and key in the stock symbol you want (computes OBV and MFI over a variety of time frames, plus a number of other indicators) And here is another site which computes OBV and for several other technical indicators actually provides back-testing over selected periods of time to show whether trading, based solely upon that technical indicator, would have been profitable or not. Not all stocks respond equally to all technical indicators. tscn.com Finally, a warning to any lurkers who may have made it this far: trading stocks is like trading art ... be sure you buy only what you like because if the market does not agree with you, you may be looking at it for a long time. So I recommend buying only stocks one likes, but using technical indicators to fine-tune entry and exit points. JSb.