Divide By 20: One Year later

Happy New Year, one day early. Here’s wishing 2017 is successful for you in whichever way you define success.

Aren’t calendars wonderful? A couple of days ago, up pops a reminder on my calendar to revisit a post I did a year ago. At the very beginning of 2016, I wrote a post on whether yearly performance was mean-reverting, and found some interesting things. You might want to go back and take a look first, before you continue reading here.

Continue reading Divide By 20: One Year later

TRINdicators

When I start to write a blog post, usually my process is this:

  1. Come up with a really bad pun for the title.
  2. Write the rest of it.

Bad puns are an important part of finance, and life in general.

A blog reader contacted me recently to chat about various technical analysis indicators, and one he mentioned was “TRIN”, aka the Arms Index. If you’ve been reading my blog awhile, you know that technical analysis makes my skin crawl…at least the kind that debates whether the chart shows a double top or a head and shoulders pattern. Interpreting shapes in financial data is just another form of tasseography. Give me quantities that I can quantify!

That said, some classical “TA” indicators can be useful. For example, RSI is useful because it can be tested and be shown to work for some systems. Continue reading TRINdicators