John Bollinger on the MACD circa 1996

Discussion in 'Technical Analysis' started by tommcginnis, Jun 25, 2018.

  1. tommcginnis

    tommcginnis

    Found this in a 12-year-old email -- no idea where I got it, but it is a solid presentation. (It's also a bit blurry; it's from an ancient xerox.)

    While I'm not a huge fan of the MACD, I do think it holds a lot of merit -- especially for the longer term trades that I tend to avoid.

    One of the things that Bollinger makes clear right from the start, is that the oft-cited 26|12|3 parameters hold absolutely no special value: he dives right into searching for look-backs that match the market being faced. And what is more[!] is that he develops a different set of look-backs for sells as opposed to buys -- this makes perfect sense to me, but I had never committed that to memory, I guess.

    A good look at a good indicator, *without* anything smacking of faith or religion: just testable, repeatable observation.
     
  2. temnik

    temnik

    Blah-blah-blah...
    He doesn't provide a statistical backtest - just a bunch of suggestive charts. So who cares?
     
    d08 likes this.
  3. dozu888

    dozu888

    so, a useless indicator comments on another useless indicator... yawn yawn.