If you haven’t heard yet, then you probably will some point on Monday: Japan’s benchmark Nikkei 225 Stock Average closed in the red on Friday, marking its 12th consecutive decline, the longest since a 15-session losing streak in April-May 1954 during a time of “economic uncertainty” after the end of the Korean War. However, the current losing streak is likely to end over the next day or two, as buyers emerge and tip the close into positive territory. No plunge protection team at work that we know of and largely unnecessary, because even though the Nikkei 225 has declined just over 8.5% during the losing streak, over half of the losses have been limited to double-digits, with most of those being very small in percentage terms. That said, we’re not expecting a strong bounce back, although maybe, perhaps a gradual one, since recovering even 14,500 remains a big hurdle. Know that there’s ...

In this week's strategy test I take a look at on-balance-volume. Unlike the majority of the technical indicators, on-balance-volume (and accumulation/distribution) uses price as an actionary tab to measured volume; adding volume to a cumulative total on a higher close, but subtracting on a lower close. But how well does it perform as a trading indicator? The basic test looked at buying when on-balance-volume was positive and selling when negative. Test period: A complete bull-bear cycle defined by the S&P (March 20th 2000 to October 8th 2007). Stocks: Active Trader list (AAPL BA C CAT CSCO DIS GM HPQ IBM INTC IP JPM KO MSFT SBUX T WMT) Number of shares: 100 Commission: $9.95 (included in the loss calculation) Trades: Round-trip only; partial trades were excluded. As in the earlier stochastic analysis the number of trades executed was very large; just over 1,000 over the 7 year period. This ...