Technical Analysis

Wikipedia (15th January 2009) describes Technical analysis as follows:

Technical analysis is a security analysis technique that claims the ability to forecast the future direction of prices through the study of past market data, primarily price and volume. In its purest form, technical analysis considers only the actual price and volume behavior of the market or instrument. Technical analysts, sometimes called "chartists", may employ models and trading rules based on price and volume transformations, such as the relative strength index, moving averages, regressions, inter-market and intra-market price correlations, cycles or, classically, through recognition of chart patterns.

Technical analysis stands in distinction to fundamental analysis. Technical analysis "ignores" the actual nature of the company, market, currency or commodity and is based solely on "the charts," that is to say price and volume information, whereas fundamental analysis does look at the actual facts of the company, market, currency or commodity. For example, any large brokerage, trading group, or financial institution will typically have both a technical analysis and fundamental analysis team.

Technical analysis is widely used among traders and financial professionals, and is very often used by active day traders, market makers, and pit traders.

DTS’s Java charts have been designed to have a number of technical analyzes incorporated in them. The range includes the following:

Momentum
Simple Moving Average
Exponential Moving Average
RSI
ROC
Bollinger Bands
MACD (Exponential).

These are some of the better known technical analysis studies and are only a sample of the ones that can be incorporated. Any other technical analysis can be added on request.

Some of the studies are overlaid on the data itself whilst others create their own sub-charts that are linked to the main chart but can be detached for closer examination. Both of these options can be seen in the chart below. Note the menu item "Detach Sub chart". This can be used on either of the technical analysis studies on the example chart, whereas the moving averages (5 and 25 days) are overlaid onto the data itself.