Author: The INO.com Team

How To Use Cycles
Everything in nature moves in cycles. . . the cycles of the seasons ... night and day... tides... phases of the moon. Each year animals hibernate... geese migrate... salmon swim upstream to spawn... and every seven years lemmings run into the ocean.

While nature's cycles are very visible, there are many cycles in the futures markets that are not quite as obvious. Often the reason some cycles are not easily seen is because the interaction of many large and small cycles makes individual cycles harder to see.

Cycles are the tendency for events to repeat themselves at more or less uniform intervals. One of the easiest cycles to see and understand is the seasonal cycle. Agricultural commodities have a repetitive annual price pattern called the seasonal price cycle. More than 70 of the time, the lowest cash prices of the year for corn, cotton and soybeans occur during the fall harvest period. Due to increased marketings, cattle and hogs also have price weakness during the fall. Wheat and oats tend to make seasonal lows during their summer harvest. Seasonal price trends are a reflection of regular annual changes in supply and demand factors caused by weather, production and demand.

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How To Use The Relative Strength Index
One of the most useful tools employed by many technical commodity traders is a momentum oscillator which measures the velocity of directional price movement.

When prices move up very rapidly, at some point the commodity is considered overbought; when they move down very rapidly, the commodity is considered oversold at some point. In either case, a reaction or reversal is imminent. The slope of the momentum oscillator is directly proportional to the velocity of the move, and the distance traveled up or down by this oscillator is proportional to the magnitude of the move.

The momentum oscillator is usually characterized by a line on a chart drawn in two dimensions. The vertical axis represents magnitude or distance the indicator moves; the horizontal axis represents time. Such a momentum oscillator moves very rapidly at market turning points and then tends to slow down as the market continues the directional move. Suppose we are using closing prices to calculate the oscillator and the price is moving up daily by exactly the same increment from close to close. At some point, the oscillator begins to flatten out and eventually becomes a horizontal line. If the price begins to level out, the oscillator will begin to descend.

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