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The transparency of the American markets offers an array of indicators and allows deep insights of prevailing sentiment. You find the activities of NYSE members like specialists and floor traders, public and odd lot short sales, the Short Interest Ratio as well as the large block transactions of the institutional investors published every week. Other tools for technical analysis include trend indicators, daily advances and declines, daily new highs and lows, volume, indices, put/call ratios and other useful information like Stochastics, RSI, MACD, TICK and more. The problem is only that all these indicators contradict each other most of the time. Countless books have been written on this subject, and no matter how many will be written in the future, always be aware that there is no such thing as the Holy Grail of the stock market.Notwithstanding, some people are more successful than others and the answer is quite simple: No indicator is right all the time and you don't have to be right all the time. Just be right slightly more often than wrong. Choose some reliable indicators from this book and stick to them. Don't follow some indicators for a while and switch to some others if they fail. Don't be a technician in the first half of the year and a fundamentalist the next half. Be consistent and disciplined in your approach. Don't abandon a good indicator because you think this time everything is different. It takes of course a lot of guts to stick to your choices because the opinions of the most widely quoted gurus of Wall Street are usually contrary to your indicators at that time. Their opinions are usual based on old fundamentals and their investment time frame is usually different than yours. It is much easier to be of an independent mind if you don't use margin. You will sleep a lot better if you buy fifty shares of IBM with the money you can spare than two hundred shares on credit.
The journey towards a successful investment/trading program start with a single step, of acquiring a comprehensive compendium of technical indicators used on Wall Street.
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