Saturday, November 22, 2008

Accelerator & Awesome Oscillators

Though I don't use many technical indicators, I like to take a read and review them once in a while. I simply enjoy the insights provided by these indicators.

The Accelerator indicator (AC) is suppose to measure the acceleration & deceleration of the current driving force! Take a closer look at its formulae:

AO = SMA(median price, 5) - SMA(median price, 34)
AC = AO-SMA(AO,5)

where:
SMA — Simple Moving Averages;
AO — Awesome Oscillator.

Do the formulae above look similar to MACD?
1. Remember, the MACD line is also the difference of 2 Moving Averages (MA), the Exponential MA instead of Simple MA. So it is analogous to the AO formula.

2. The MACD Histogram (or MA Oscillator) is given by:
OSMA = MACD - Signal; where the Signal is the MA(9) of the MACD line.
So it is the same form as the Accelerator (AC) formula

The differences are the default parameters in usage:
MACD (12, 26, 9) - if we change to MACD (5, 34, 5), then it is equivalent to the default settings of AC & AO!

See the results below (double click to enlarge graph).










The MACD (blue) line moves in sync with the AO envelope (green & red bars).
The MACD Histogram (yellow) is almost identical to the AC envelope (green & red bars).

In other words MACD also conveys the same underlying information only if you know how to decipher and interpret them with different parameter values!

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