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Technology Stocks : VALENCE TECHNOLOGY (VLNC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Chisy who wrote (11251)	5/20/1999 12:53:00 AM
From: Rich Wolf	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 27311

re: TA - I consider it a trading tool which only shows where you've been, but cannot say where you are going. IF you have a belief or gut feeling that a trend will follow a previous pattern, or are looking for signs of a new pattern, you can correlate that with the PAST history, which the TA provides quantitative analysis of. The caveat is that the past cannot predict the future. Any 'predictive' notions depend upon your assumed paradigm. In our case, the longs anticipate a paradigm shift 'soon,' which would break the short-term rolling wave pattern that many have been trading on. The question is timing, as we all know. The sites I have found which incorporate intra-day samples in their calculations of various TA indicators (sites such as IQcharts, at iqc.com) do not allow you to control the duration of the averaging window for a selected time sampling rate. Hence, while one may like to use 15 or 30 minute sample points (for instance), the fixed number of sample points incorporated into calculating the averages is not large enough for my tastes. (ie, when you select shorter sample intervals, the length of the averaging window is also shortened; this is a bad feature, and I would gladly accept recommendations of sites where the user has control of this variable.) During high-volume periods, I can live with the result (of the shortened window) because there are enough trades occurring within each data interval that the sample point is rather like an 'average' itself. But when the volume is low as it is now, this is not the case, and individual buying/selling waves appearing at the sample time can 'corrupt' the measurement. My use of TA is minimal compared to most: I consider it only a quantitative tool to help me verify/modify what my intuition tells me about the trend in the tape. I look to answer questions such as: is money flowing in or out? Are the buyers overtaking the sellers? Is a rally or selloff occurring, and is it building or fading in intensity? Is the tape starting to turn? Hence I mostly look at the volume, moving averages, MACD, and stochastics. I don't have the religion of seeking to find the various formations that others look for in the data. Valence technically shows a trend this week, but it is weak, since it has occurred on low volume. Right now the volume is too low for me to use TA. But that's just me. PS money flow looks pretty good though!