Can anyone recommand a good trend oscilator? As part of my automated strategy.. I need to come out with a condition for determining the uptrend or downtrend. Anyone recommand a method for accomplishing this? So the system only goes long with the trend is upwards!
some easy things include slope of a ema (i like the 34ema). Beware of fast oscillators macd stochastics etc, they will tell you you are in a downtrend while youre really in a retracement.
To detect strong trends, I would use 2 distinct EMAs (say 20 & 50 for example), and check both are going up (or down), the shorter one above the longer one for uptrend (reverse for downtrend) AND the 2 are somewhat parallel (distance between the 2 at last bar ~ same as 5, 10, 15 & 20 bars ago). You can remove the last criteria for less strong trends.