Stocks & Commodities V. 23:11 (10-14): Letters To S&C by Technical Analysis, Inc.

The editors of S&C invite readers to submit their opinions and information on subjects relating to technical analysis and this magazine. This column is our means of communication with our readers. Is there something you would like to know more (or less) about? Tell us about it. Without a source of new ideas and subjects coming from our readers, this magazine would not exist.

TRUE STRENGTH INDEX

Editor,

As a veteran reader of S&C, I have found the recent dialogue on William Blau’s TSI (true strength index) very interesting. I consider Blau’s work on double smoothing as remarkably insightful. William Blau and I were friends and I remember how proud he was of the development of the TSI and related techniques, which were simple but elegant. I would like to point out, however, that the implementation is not a secret. At the risk of seeming promotional, I published it in my 1995 book Trading Systems & Methods and have expanded that coverage in the recent fourth edition, along with Blau’s other techniques. The implementation of TSI can be done in one line in TradeStation, but it’s easier to read in three lines:

Num = smoothedaverage(smoothedaverage (close-close[1],smooth1),smooth2); Denom = smoothedaverage(smoothedaverage (absvalue(close-close[1]),smooth1),smooth2); TSI = 100*num/denom;

PERRY KAUFMAN, via email

Editor: Thank you for sharing this. Readers may be interested to find the following articles by William Blau as well as one by Perry Kaufman at the S&C Online Store: Blau, William [1991]. “Double Smoothed-Stochastics,” Technical Analysis of STOCKS & COMMODITIES, Volume 9: January.