The Rest of the Toolbox
The indicators you will meet, briefly.
TradingView ships hundreds of indicators. Most are variations on a handful of ideas: measure the trend, measure the momentum, measure the volatility, or measure the volume. Here is the rest of what you will actually encounter. Momentum How far price is from its statistical average. Above +100 is a strong move up, below −100 a strong move down. Unbounded, unlike RSI. Williams %R Effectively the stochastic upside down, scaled −100 to 0. Same strengths, same weaknesses. Rate of Change (ROC) Price now versus price N periods ago, as a percentage. The most direct momentum measure there is. Money Flow Index (MFI) RSI with volume folded in. Often called a volume-weighted RSI. Awesome Oscillator The gap between a fast and a slow average of the candle midpoints. A simpler cousin of MACD. Volatility and channels Keltner Channels Like Bollinger Bands, but built from ATR instead of standard deviation. Smoother, less prone to sudden width changes. Donchian Channels The highest high and lowest low of the last N periods. Crude, honest, and the basis of some famous trend systems. Standard Deviation The raw volatility measure that sits underneath Bollinger Bands. Volume Accumulation / Distribution Like OBV, but weights each period by where price closed within its range rather than treating every up-close alike. Chaikin Money Flow Accumulation/Distribution expressed as an oscillator around zero. Volume Profile Volume plotted against price rather than time. Shows the prices where most trading actually happened, which are the prices the market cares about. Levels Pivot Points Levels calculated from the previous period's high, low and close. Mechanical, widely watched, and self-fulfilling for exactly that reason. Fibonacci retracements Levels at 38.2%, 50% and 61.8% of a prior move. There is no mechanism behind the numbers. They work to the extent that enough people watch them, which is a real effect but not the one usually claimed. Adding more indicators does not add more information. Most of these are computed from the same open, high, low, close and volume, so stacking five momentum tools gives you one opinion repeated five times, and a dangerous feeling of confirmation.
Part of Learn NEPSE Investing, a free course on reading Nepali company accounts and charts. Section: Charts.