Publications: The Trade-Press Record

What the record contains

Twenty-three distinct documents, dated between May 2004 and February 2009, across twelve publications: two technical-analysis monthlies, a national newspaper, a hedge-fund newswire, a private-investor association journal, a finance portal and a wire service. Three of the twenty-three were filed under two directories at once and are one document each, which is why a count of paths gives a larger number than a count of articles.

The four entries whose subject the record names

Most filenames carry only a publication and a month. Four carry more, and those four are the ones worth following, because each has a page here that sets out the same subject at length:

• May 2004, The Technical Analyst: Volume spikes. Covered here under volume studies.
• September 2005, The Technical Analyst: The percentage volume oscillator. Covered here under volume studies.
• December 2005, Technical Analysis of Stocks & Commodities: The advance/decline line. Covered here under the advance/decline line.
• July 2007, Working Money: “Those Money-Making E-Minis”, by David Penn. Covered here under reading an indicator page.

The bibliography

Why the entries are citations rather than files

Each of these articles was written by a journalist and published by a magazine, a newspaper or a wire service, and each remains that publication's property. A bibliographic entry needs no permission from anyone: the date, the publication and the subject are facts about the record. Reproducing the document is a different act, and it needs a licence from the publisher that a reader of this page has no way to verify and that this site does not hold.

The practical loss is smaller than it looks. Where the record names a subject, that subject has a page here with the formula, the arithmetic and the failure modes set out at more length than a magazine column allows: the volume-spike and oscillator material sits under volume studies, and the December 2005 subject has its own page at the advance/decline line. Where the record names no subject, the entry is what it is, a dated reference in a named publication, and inventing a title for it would make this page less useful rather than more.

The 2013 and 2014 series

Nine further documents sit apart from the list above, numbered one to nine and dated between June 2013 and August 2014. Their filenames carry a sequence number and a date and no publication, which is the signature of an in-house run rather than press coverage: a newsletter, a set of market notes, or a research series issued at irregular intervals across fourteen months. The record does not say which, so they are counted separately and described no further. They carry no inbound references of any kind, which is consistent with a private or subscriber-only run.

How to read a bibliography like this

A dated list of coverage is a weak signal on its own and a useful one in aggregate. Any single product review in a trading monthly says little: the magazines reviewed a great many tools in those years, and a review is not a verification. The pattern across the list carries more, because it shows which questions were being asked. Volume spikes in 2004, the oscillator family in 2005, breadth by advance/decline in late 2005: that sequence is the trade press working through the same problem this reference is organised around, which is how to tell a move that many participants took part in from one that merely travelled a long way.

The absence after 2007 is worth as much as the presence before it. Coverage stopped while the methods stayed in use, which is the normal fate of a technique that becomes standard: it moves out of the articles and into the default chart template, where it is applied without being examined. That is the state most of these indicators are in today, and it is the reason every page here states where its subject misleads.