RE: Psychological Index

["Daryl Roberts" <darylroberts@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

When I tried to put this into the System tester, 1st I get this error
message: "This is not a recognized name, constant or operator."  - and the
cursor is at "PsychIndex <= |Lthreshold"

So I pasted in the 1st section of conditions that I presumed was supposed to
go into the formula builder, and put them into the Enter Long window; but
then I get another error message:  "This function is not allowed in this
type of formula."  - and the cursor goes to:   "theLookBack:= |Input("Number
of lookback periods", 2, 100, 12);

I'm a long ways from actually understanding what I'm doing here, but perhaps
Glen will recognize my errant ways & means.
Thanks

Daryl Roberts
(626) 836-0581

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-metastock@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:owner-metastock@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]On
Behalf Of Glen Wallace
Sent: Sunday, August 06, 2000 7:31 PM
To: MetaStock listserver
Subject: Re: Psychological Index

> > There was an overbought/oversold indicator described in the June
> > 2000 Futures Magazine called the Psychological Index.  It looked
> > sort of interesting, so I wrote the MetaStock code for it:
> >
> > {Futures Magazine, Vol.29 No.6, June 2000, P.48}
> > LookBack:= Input("Number of lookback periods", 2, 100, 12);
> > UThreshold:= Input("Upper threshold (%)", 0, 100, 75);
> > LThreshold:= Input("Lower threshold (%)", 0, 100, 25);
> > UpDay:= If(CLOSE > Ref(CLOSE,-1), 1, 0);
> > PsychIndex:= Sum(UpDay,LookBack) / LookBack * 100;
> > PsychIndex; UThreshold; LThreshold
>
> Am I reading this right? This looks like no more than the % of days
> in the past "N" periods that have closed up.


Yup.  Rocket science it ain't, but it does tend to highlight overbought
and oversold conditions.  And like most overbought/oversold indicators,
they're unreliable as stand-alone systems.