Followers of Barry Ritzholz's TheBigPicture and Felix Salmon's Conde Nast Portfolio will have noticed the battle between the pro-market-technician and anti-market-technician stance of the respective authors. Unfortunately for Felix, using Jim Cramer as an example of a market technician at work does little to help his cause (Jim Cramer is many things, but market technician he is not). Felix's key point was Whenever you hear words like "overbought" or "oversold" or "momentum" or "support" or "resistance", it means that whatever you're hearing is garbage. But it also means that the person you're listening to has no idea what's about to happen, and is therefore resorting to the financial equivalent of astrology. In such cases, it's worth ignoring the message completely, but it's also worth having some serious thoughts about the messenger, too. Barry responded with a point-by-point blow as to benefits of using technical analysis can bring the ...

Greater reference has been made in recent times to the association between blog readership and market reversals, not just from Barry's TheBigPicture from this past February and March, but also in the spikes in volume for TraderMike, Traderfeed, and my personal blog. So for this paper napkin research I did some analysis of my personal blog web traffic. I converted my visitors number using the same calculation as used for on-balance-volume; termed on-balance-visits. When the S&P closed higher I added my blog readership to a cumulative total, when it closed lower I subtracted it. Overall, I experienced strong readership growth; moving from around 400 visits a day in October 2007 to the 700 currently:By using an on-balance-visit calculation I can sidestep some of the concerns which may effect other metric calculations ...