Why my indicators are open-source, and why yours should be tooThis post explains my mindset of why i publish only indicators and only under open-source.
A common opinion is that if an indicator or strategy is publicly known, then it cannot be profitable. In economics theory, this is known as the efficient market hypothesis(1), which states that once a strategy is widely adopted, it is integrated in prices and hence cannot be profitable anymore.
Hence, it is a legitimate question to ask: are any of the open-source indicators useful for professional trading?
I do not believe in magic bullet indicators, those that are claimed to indicate when to buy or when to sell. I don't think any indicator, or even any set of indicator, can reliably do that over the long term in any market without human intervention to decide at some point when the signals are true or false positives. Likewise, i do not believe automated strategies can reliably be profitable.
Hence, my focus is to design indicators that can help reveal hiddee structures or simply help in visualizing faster and more easily market's data. As profitable traders know, the raw price action still rules above all, with volume and order flow being the next best metrics, but we can design indicators to give us an edge in terms of time spent analyzing the market, and this is what all my work is focused on: to save me time and reduce interpretation errors. And maybe it can be useful to you too.
Indicators are merely a tool, and no two people will use them exactly the same. Just like giving a fishing rod doesn't make the recipient a fisher, i don't believe that just because indicators are free or open-source they lose their utility. The whole world is fishing, yet any competent fisher can still catch fishes, because they know where, when and how, it's not just because they have a fishing rod, and arguably, the fishing rod is only a necessary tool, but not the most important thing that makes them competent fishers: what makes them competent fishers are skills.
In summary, i am trying to help in understanding the market, not in predicting it. Assessing likelihoods and probabilities of future events and knowing what you can do are your job and depend on your skills solely. If you don't know how, there are free online tutorials(2) to get started, but nothing replaces experience acquired through hard work.
For example, one of my favorite ways to visualize is to encode sentiment related infos as a coloret bar at the bottom, or by highlighting the background. These representations may be simplistic, and that's the goal, anybody can understand them intuitively without even looking at the description, yet they can encode very complex and heterogenous information.
The human brain remains the best informational system when it comes to integrating huge volumes of heterogenous data, as the financial markets generate. So my indicators are meant to boost brains, not replace them. Even artificial intelligence bots have a hard time being profitable (i know, this is my original field of expertise, they require near constant monitoring to avoid potentially catastrophical errors and tweakings to adapt to the market). There is simply no shortcut to hard training when it comes to becoming a good, profitable trader.
Hence, even if my indicators are, I believe, vezy helpful to understand the market and can gice an edge, and ecen though I use several all the time, to be honest, you likely won't get any benefits if you don't know what you are doing, if you are inexperienced with trading.
The above explains why i think publicly available indicators can still be useful, but not why i publish under open-source, which is anither step beyond free but clised-source publication. Truth is, I am marvelled by the open-source spirit in the TradingView community, which is the biggest database of open-source financial indicators ever. As I strted above, these indicators are unlikely to be profitable on their own, but that's not the point: sharing indicators is sharing an idea, a concept, a blueprint, that can then be developed further, or be food for thoughts for a whole new indicator, or just broaden your horizons of how you view the markets.
Therefore, I decided to stay in this spirit and publish all my indicators under open-source. I am very grateful for the giants on which shoulders I stay, and I am eager to hear feedbacks on my work, so we all further our collective understanding of markets!
Enjoy, and be safe!
Tartigradia
(1) Timmermann, A., & Granger, C. W. (2004). Efficient market hypothesis and forecasting. International Journal of Forecasting, 20, 15-27.
(2) cobie.substack.com
