Trading Outpost

Stop Using Stochastic Until You See The Real Trap

Every figure, level, setting and definition the finished picture puts on screen, chased to a primary source. Anything that could not be chased is listed at the bottom and is not drawn.

What the oscillator measures

The stochastic oscillator reports where the close sits inside the high to low range of the lookback period, expressed from zero to one hundred. StockCharts states it as “the level of the close relative to the high-low range over a given period”, and quotes George Lane, who developed it in the late 1950s, saying that it “doesn’t follow price, it doesn’t follow volume or anything like that. It follows the speed or the momentum of price.”

The formula on screen

%K = (close  minus  lowest low) / (highest high  minus  lowest low) x 100
%D = 3 period simple moving average of %K

Lowest low is the lowest low of the lookback period and highest high the highest high of the same period. Both are stated in that form by StockCharts. TradingView documents the smoothed version its own indicator computes as %K = SMA(100 * (close - lowest low) / (highest high - lowest low), smoothK) and %D = SMA(%K, periodD), which is the same measurement with a smoothing pass added.

Fourteen, three, three

The three numbers drawn on the setting drums are the lookback period, the %K smoothing and the %D smoothing.

TradingView’s built in Stochastic ships with %K Length 14, %K Smoothing 3 and %D Smoothing

  1. StockCharts gives the Full Stochastic Oscillator default as (14,3,3), with the same three roles, and the Fast and Slow versions as (14,3).

Not every platform ships those numbers. MetaTrader 5’s Stochastic Oscillator defaults to a %K period of 5, a %D period of 3 and a slowing of 3, so the picture attributes 14, 3, 3 to the platforms that actually document it rather than to platforms in general.

The eighty and twenty levels

Eighty is the conventional overbought threshold and twenty the conventional oversold threshold. StockCharts: “Traditional settings use 80 as the overbought threshold and 20 as the oversold threshold.” TradingView ships the same two levels on its built in indicator. Binance Academy teaches the same pair as a buy and sell reading, which is the reading this video is about.

A reading above eighty is not by itself bearish

StockCharts states it directly: “Overbought readings aren’t necessarily bearish. Securities can become overbought and remain overbought during a strong uptrend”, and adds that “this is why it’s important to identify the bigger trend and trade in the direction of this trend.” The same page notes the indicator “can also be used to identify turns near support or resistance.”

Divergence

Drawn to the standard definitions. “A bullish divergence forms when price records a lower low, but the Stochastic Oscillator forms a higher low.” “A bearish divergence forms when price records a higher high, but the Stochastic Oscillator forms a lower high.”

Every divergence drawn in this video is found in the plotted series by the swing pivot test rather than placed by hand, so no line is drawn between two points chosen to lean the right way.

The other indicators shown briefly

One shot shows several momentum tools stacked under one chart. Each is computed from the same bars to its published definition rather than sketched.

The price series on screen

Every chart in this video is an illustrative series, generated to show the mechanism being described, and it is labelled as illustrative on screen wherever it appears. No chart asserts that a particular thing happened in a particular market at a particular time, and no reading, win rate or outcome is claimed from one. Every number printed beside a chart is computed from the bars actually drawn, at the settings named on screen.

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