An excerpt from an email from Hayden to the LinnSoft Yahoo Group on 03/25/02

My comments are not about any particular TI, but about all of them and my change of attitude. My original approach was to explore TI's to find the one that best suited my needs. Not a bad approach, but somewhat like a teenager who discovers love feelings and locks onto the first available partner willing to put up with his pimples and gangliness. Now I am working on a more thorough approach of printing out all the TI pages, going through each and every one, making a chart in IRT for each one - in short, to make a study of each TI to better understand them.

I am assuming that TI's have been developed by some of the best minds in the field who spent much time researching and fine tuning the calculations, that the best known TI's have proven themselves over time. So being a little more humble and looking more carefully seems appropriate. Not to mention the thrill of eventually being able to make a complete fool of myself at a party by running through TI names and features.

One concrete contribution at this point is that Technical Indicators divorced from a time frame are nothing more than cute phenomena: rainbows, lightning and shooting stars. The power of a TI comes when the user has fixed on a time frame and the TI gives a signal that could result in a decent trade more often than not. False signals come with the territory; can't blame it on the TI.

Another comment is that TI's are just like Chapter titles. All the tweaking, juggling, exploring periods and relationships are what the chapter is all about. They need to be refined to suit our needs. Unfortunately, this can take a lot of time, but if you love the market as a field of study then who can complain.

Best regards,
Hayden