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Technical indicators

Marc de Verdelhan edited this page Sep 7, 2017 · 11 revisions

Technical indicators (a.k.a. technicals) are used to analyze short-term price movements and to help identify good entry and exit points for the stock. They provide metrics whose values are derived from a time series or other indicators.

About technical indicators:

In ta4j, all technical indicators implement the Indicator interface. So a list of all the indicators provided can be found in the Javadoc.

Backtesting indicators

Technicals also need to be backtested on historic data to see how effective they would have been to predict future prices. Some examples are available in this sense.

Caching mechanism

Some indicators need recursive calls and/or values from the previous ticks in order to calculate their last value. For that reason, a caching mechanism has been implemented for all the indicators provided by ta4j. This system avoids calculating the same value twice. Therefore, if a value has been already calculated it is retrieved from cache the next time it is requested.

Warning! If a maximum tick count has been set for the related time series, then the results calculated for evicted ticks are evicted too. They also cannot be recomputed since the related ticks have been removed. That being said, moving time series should not be used when you need to access long-term past ticks.