Most widely used indicators for short-term directional

H

hmap1

Hello, I promise this is not a stupid question of looking for the "best" indicators that are being used. I realize it varies based on the trader. What I am looking for is a general concensus of the most widely used standard indicators traders are using these days to help determine short term directional bias. The shorter timeframe the better. Obviously without giving away any trading sytles, what combinations work for YOU as an individual trader. No parameters, just indicators. Thanks,

Which ones?

Accumulation / Distribution
Bolinger Bands
CCI
DeMarker
Directional Movement Index (+DI/-DI, ADX)
Envelope
MACD
Median Price
Moving Average
Momentum
OBV
Oscillators
OsMA
Parabolic SAR
ROC
RSI
Standard Deviation
Stochastics
Volume
 
I am mostly looking for a survey of indicators that people succesfully use for short term trading. I am trying to expand my trading toolkit and I would like to try out some new indicators. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.
 
I personally use Commodity Channel Index and Fast Stochatics for my charts.. Gives me a pretty good idea which way the market is going to go.
 
You listed 19 indicators. If you use combinations of 2 there are 342 combinations, if you use combinations of 3 there are 5800+, 4 yields 93000, etc. Then if you think about the combinations of settings for each indicator, say 20 on the average, just the combination of 2 will have 136,800 combinations, 3 will yield 46,400,000 and if you want to try all combinations of all the indicators you will have 19 factorial times 20 to the 19th power combinations which is about 6.3 times 10 to the 41st power. You have your work cut out for you!! Furthermore some people have done work using the same indicator with different settings and on different bar intervals so that expands the selection even further. You wonder why neural nets have not come up with much over the years!!
 
Quote from maxpi:

You listed 19 indicators. If you use combinations of 2 there are 342 combinations, if you use combinations of 3 there are 5800+, 4 yields 93000, etc. Then if you think about the combinations of settings for each indicator, say 20 on the average, just the combination of 2 will have 136,800 combinations, 3 will yield 46,400,000 and if you want to try all combinations of all the indicators you will have 19 factorial times 20 to the 19th power combinations which is about 6.3 times 10 to the 41st power. You have your work cut out for you!! Furthermore some people have done work using the same indicator with different settings and on different bar intervals so that expands the selection even further. You wonder why neural nets have not come up with much over the years!!
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I didn't mean to kill the thread really!! I think my math actually errs on the side of making it look like an easier task than it really is.

Fortunately for all of us we can get Qcharts and put up indicators ad nauseaum and put up different timeframes and a global cursor and just scan backwards in time and try out all kinds of indicators and different settings and we can get Tradestation 2000 and do some backtesting and optimization to find the settings we like for each indicator. It is a real challenge, one that academics with a lot of letters behind their names are not up to, at all, read the drivel they make their living off of about "efficient markets", I laugh every time I see that term nowadays. Going to name my yacht "Efficient Markets".
 
I use the MACD with RSI in conjunction with watching volume and Time & Sales. I just started to study the CCI and I think I will set it up and watch it next week during trading. For my personality type and for the way I trade the MACD with RSI work very good.
 
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