As for the webcast, I guess that’s a GMTA- I listened to that last one yesterday evening as well, and have some 3×5 notecards with notes jotted down, mostly about how Dave and Jeff kept having to excuse what StrategyDesk “can’t do” or “can’t do YET”; but also got a couple (just a couple) of good ideas: for one, I noticed that, just like I do with the “Custom Field Wizard” under “Columns”, you can set an ALERT and then see what code the program “writes” for you… and then use that as an example for new strategy formulas.

All of this would of course be unneccesary if they would just WRITE A DECENT F**KING MANUAL!! HELLO!!

https://tdameritradeevents.webex.com/mw0302l/mywebex/default.do?siteurl=tdameritradeevents&service=6&main_url=%2Fec0507l%2Feventcenter%2Fmainframe.do%3Fmainurl%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Ftdameritradeevents.webex.com%252Fec0507l%252Feventcenter%252Fevent%252FeventAction.do%253FtheAction%253Ddetail%2526confViewID%253D0%2526siteurl%253Dtdameritradeevents%26siteurl%3Dtdameritradeevents

After they complete their series of webcasts I hope to be more enlightened (Smiley Face goes here). Thanks for the tolerance.

Based on some experiments with SD’s “Custom Field Wizard” under “Columns”, the plain MACD formula is just returning us the actual difference between the moving averages, in other words, pretty useless as its crossing zero just gives us the same results as a “normal” moving average crossover forumula.

The useful version appears to be the histogram version with “Diff” in the formula, i.e. MACD[Diff,Close,12,26,9,D]; that formula returns the difference between the MACD line (difference between the moving averages) and the signal line… which is what we really want. When the “Diff” formula hits zero, the MACD line is crossing the signal line, and we have a potential change in trend.

This doesn’t however, give us the important info about where the crossover is taking place (above or below the MACD “zero” line, or in other words, whether we’re at the bottom of a downtrend, top of an uptrend, or the lines are just randomly crossing over each other in the middle somewhere).

Just using the “Diff” formula in addition to an RSI and/or Stochastics should be useful enough. Knowing that we had an MACD crossover downwards with an RSI of 80 would be pretty significant.

But to make the MACD stuff itself into a useful formula, we may have to add multiple statements: MACD[Diff,Close,12,26,9,D] > 0 AND MACD[Diff,Close,12,26,9,D,1] < 0 (MACD “up” crossover), strung together with AND MACD[MACD,Close,12,26,9,D] < 0 (lines are below zero, i.e. price is low in the trend)

According to AMTD’s (Advanced Analyzer) documentation (pdf file here, it’s on p. 29), the arrows appear when the averages cross the centerline- green for an “up” cross, red for “down.” I have noticed that many of the green arrows on mine appear BELOW the centerline, so go figure. I think it may generate arrows when the faster MA crosses the slower MA AND when they cross the zero line. Lots of arrows.

I’ve looked at a few stocks, and haven’t seen too much correlation between all three MACDs making crosses on the same day and a subsequent trend that wouldn’t have been indicated by just the longest MACD period. But, again, just looked at a few so far, and as you see, I’m wide open to being wrong.