Market Data Questions

TC2000 Charting Package and Exponential Moving Averages

I am a TC2000 user, and have a question concerning their treatment of the indicators you have originated and use.  Below is a description of how my TC2000 software program applies your creation.  This comes from the Help Files associated with TC2000: T2106 McClellan Oscillator:

The McClellan Oscillator is reported each day by many financial news services. Their reported value will almost always be different than our value because, as mentioned earlier, we use every stock on the NYSE. The overall trend of the indicator, however, will be the same.

The McClellan Oscillator is calculated by subtracting a 39 day moving average of (Advances - Declines) from a 19 day moving average of (Advances - Declines). It not only works as an overbought/oversold indicator, it works fairly well at making short-term trend changes when it crosses the zero line. Here again it is very important that you set your chart scaling to Arithmetic because the McClellan Oscillator will be negative on some market days and negative values cannot be displayed on a Logarithmic scale.

Question: Is their [TC2000’s] way really different, or do these MAs just mimic the results of how you calculate them?  The charts of theirs and yours on your reports look pretty close in form.  At this point in time I don’t need exact figures to find it useful for myself.  Are there any other packaged software programs out there that you know of that use your formulas?  For instance, one where I could plug in a symbol and pull up its Price Osc., 5% and 10% trend, Summ. Index, etc.

Most of the competent charting packages will allow you to calculate exponential moving averages (EMAs).  Their terminology is different from ours, due to the public's fascination with moving averages being ascribed to some time parameter.  We use the original terminology used by P.N. Haurlan, the first to employ EMAs, and the first guy west of the Mississippi to use a computer for technical analysis.  He referred to specific EMAs by their "smoothing constant", and we have continued that tradition.  

To calculate a 10% Trend, you need to tell the software program to give you a 19-day EMA.  A 5% Trend is a 39-day EMA.  To get a Price Oscillator, try using the MACD function, and select the appropriate EMAs.  You can play around with different values to see if you like other ones better.   As to the Worden Brothers'. description of our indicator, it is a bit puzzling that they would claim that theirs is "different" because of using every stock on the NYSE.  I don't know what they think we do; it is a strange comment.  What they did not specify was that they use EMAs; they merely state moving averages.  I don't know if they are using simple moving averages (SMAs) or EMAs.  My position is that if they want to use different techniques and different data than we do, they ought to say so and call it something different.