Method
How a breakdown is built, and why it is built that way.
Most of the design decisions below cost us something. Each one is here because the alternative would have made the document easier to produce and worse to rely on.
A standing catalogue, not a bespoke opinion
There is one indicator library. It runs the same way on every ticker anyone orders, at a pinned data edition. Your order chooses which tickers get compiled out of that catalogue. It does not change how anything is measured, and it cannot change a number.
That is why the same ticker at the same edition produces the same document for everyone. The construction is fixed; only the selection varies.
A tally you can recount
The headline is always of the form ‘N of M indicators currently read X’, and all M are printed in the same document with the value that put each one on its side. That is a deliberate constraint: a single proprietary score would be shorter, would look more authoritative, and could not be checked by the person paying for it.
A count is also not a consensus. Wherever the tally is contested, the document says so on the same page as the number, and the disagreement section sets out where the contest sits.
Three timeframes, counted separately
Every indicator that can be computed on more than one timeframe is computed on the daily, the weekly and the monthly, and each timeframe is tallied on its own. A reading on the monthly chart is an answer to a different question from the same reading on the daily, and averaging them together destroys exactly the information you were paying for.
The disagreement map
Three kinds of conflict get named: between timeframes on the same indicator, between independent indicator families on the same timeframe, and inside a single indicator whose components point different ways. Each is described in terms of the shape it makes — a pullback inside a longer uptrend, a bounce inside a longer downtrend — which is a description of what is on the chart, not a claim about what happens next.
Options read against the chart
The chain and the skew are read alongside the technical picture, because the skew is priced by people taking the other side of what the chart says. Where the two disagree, that is itself a finding and it goes in the disagreement map with everything else.
Data and editions
Price and volume history come from Schwab market data. Every document names its edition — the close it was built from — and every figure in it is a measurement of conditions that already existed at that close. Nothing is extrapolated forward.
Who you are dealing with
Ticker Breakdown is a publisher. We sell one thing — the document — to the reader, and we take no money from any company we cover, hold no position we write about, and run no advertising.
Grant Whitaker is the contact. Write to [email protected] with a question before you order or after you have read one, and he answers it. We answer inside one business day.
Ticker Breakdown publishes impersonal, general-circulation market analysis on a regular schedule. We are not a registered investment adviser and do not provide individualised investment advice.