The idea of a derivative is powerful and especially useful in trading. We often don't care so much what the price is, but how it moves. For that reason the velocity, acceleration, and rarely the jerk of price is valuable information. There are a lot of numerical issues with taking time derivatives of price, the biggest of which, in my eyes, is that all transforms and filters must be causal. Because we can't have have central differences, all current information about the future must come from the past. The obvious way around this is to focus on really long term moving average derivatives, as this minimizes the noise and provides some amount of certainty about the next few price bars. The obvious issue with this is that sometimes the price moves very quickly and enormous opportunities can be missed for focusing on the bigger picture. Likewise focusing on the local picture leads to whipsaws, over-trading, and really messy time derivatives. Currently to look into this I am working on a way to adaptively move through different averaging windows to give us information about the most useful derivatives. This is kind of a new momentum indicator. Here it is shown operating on the GBPUSD pair in the bottom window. I will not explain this indicator too much in this post, but I will be releasing it soon with more information on how to use it. Though briefly, the black line represents the momentum, and as the lines/clouds move through it it gives useful information about what happens next. Take a look at how red, orange, and yellow clouds move above, through, and under the black line before breakouts
More to come...
Cheers!