A little-known waterway named after an explorer with the last name of Keltner? An early cable outlet dedicated to programming aimed at a Celtic audience?
Nope. It's an indicator used in technical analysis.
Technical analysis looks at an asset's price movement and uses that information to project how the asset will perform in the future. So...a technical trader would look at a stock chart and look for patterns in the stock's movements. Then they would use those patterns to predict what's likely to happen next.
A Keltner Channel (named after Chester W. Keltner, who introduced the concept in 1960) involves tracing three lines.
First, you draw a moving average (well, a computer does the drawing for you). A moving average calculates the average of recent prices over a set period of time. It "moves" because every day a stock trades, it creates a new price point. That changes the average. The moving average line tracks this changing average.
In the case of Keltner Channels, the moving average is an exponential moving average...meaning that more recent data points get more weight in the equation. So movements that took place a little while ago don't have as much impact as things that happened in the more recent past.
The other two lines of the Keltner Channel appear above and below the moving average. They are equidistant from the moving average line. These two lines trace the moving average to form a channel, or band...like a stream the stock might move in.
Investors using Keltner Channels are looking for situations where the stock price moves either above or below the channel. These circumstances can represent shifts in the stock's trend. For instance, a stock that peeks above the top of the channel might have pushed too far to sustain its advance. It might start losing ground as the trend reverses.
These scenarios can also signal an acceleration of the trend. It's up to the technical analyst to use other information to determine what the move beyond the Keltner Channel means.
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![Finance: What is a Chartist?](https://media1.shmoop.com/video/thumbnails/COURSE.FINANCE.650_770x433.jpg)
Finance: What is a Chartist?26 Views
Finance allah shmoop What is a chartist Well here's a
chart and here's a chart and here's a chart All
right Well these are pages from the investing bible of
a chartist A chartist is an investor really a traitor
as they tend to own stocks for a much shorter
period of time than a longer term Really invest or
type person a chartist relies solely on the patterns The
pattern's right there These are all patterns imputed by the
charts that they you know sitting poor threw for hours
and hours So check out this chart see how the
plotted data closely follows the characteristic line there The characteristic
line basically is plodded through all those dots Yes So
they're going to stare at that try to figure out
where that line is going in the future right Get
the crystal ball or all right Well let's look at
this one where the data forms what looks like Well
the head and shoulders of someone who you know doesn't
have a neck that's Just common pattern in trading And
you know if you stopped looking at it and two
thirds of the way through there it's heading down Well
Maybe you'd be short the stock for a few days
and then you see it bottoming and then you'd be
long and try to make money that way Good luck
All right len look at this chart Where is right
here where the data appears to We'll break away from
the established pattern which was all just kind of boring
Lee along down here And then suddenly everything goes up
Yeah start doing its own thing Well maybe the company
reported a good quarter or ah you know the government
cut taxes again Everything went up So these were the
tools of the chartist The chart's a chartist is the
opposite of a fundamental investor meaning that she doesn't know
or care what the company does for a living Really
she doesn't care about their p e ratio nor their
profit margins nor their debt levels on their balance sheet
nor much of anything fundamental about how their business runs
Chartist just care about the pattern they glean from the
charts and all the charts always work until they don't
And what happens when the meteor hits that is that 00:02:06.0 --> [endTime] predictable on a chart Ah
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Technical analysts don't care how companies make their money or how they run their business; they're just interested in the numbers. The data. Yeah...