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Money Flow Index: Length (um, why 14) and Time Period (um, what's best)?
Broker: Mirus (Broker), Continuum (Data), Dorman (Clearing)
Trading: Futures
Posts: 202 since Mar 2013
Thanks Given: 428
Thanks Received: 202
Howdy; I've been searching around the interwebs, and I have not been able to find a coherent discussion of why the default Money Flow Index calculation period length is 14 and if MFI is better at certain time intervals (ie, intraday, daily, weekly, monthly, etc).
Does anyone have any insight into why the default period length is 14 (either personally or via a reference)?
Also, along the same lines, does anyone have a read on the optimal time interval? Given that MFI is trying to find institutional money flows, which may happen over longer time horizons, my initial predilection is to only use >day time intervals, but I was curious what everyone else thought, too.
Thanks!
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
Broker: Mirus (Broker), Continuum (Data), Dorman (Clearing)
Trading: Futures
Posts: 202 since Mar 2013
Thanks Given: 428
Thanks Received: 202
Thanks, Cory; I'll go read up on why Wilder recommended 14 periods.
I was messing around with the MFI time period after I posted this, and it seems that it does a fairly decent job of indicating overall trend predication when the time period is blown out to >50, however when it is 10-20 time periods, it seems like it just produces a lot of noise.
Also, given that the MFI was largely created to attempt to track when institutional money moved into or out of an issue and that these large institutions may often take months to accumulate their positions, using a longer time period certainly will catch these instances of institutional money moving in over months (rather than days).
I guess it should also be noted, that I first became interested in the MFI after my reading of Birinyi, who advocated that the MFI be used as a running measure of the money flow (rather than an average over a period of time). Upon further investigation, the MFI study used in ToS doesn't even come close to what Birinyi championed (ie, individual trade by individual trade analysis), as the ToS MFI study just uses a simple average of the high, low and close to generate the "money flow". Therefore, clearly this "retail" version of (average) money flow misses much of what Birinyi espoused (ie, a directional volume weighted measure of money flow).
I sure wish I could access trade data (price ($/share) and volume (# shares)) per each individual trade so that I could build a proper MFI measure...any ideas on how to do that?
I'm still trying to effectively use volume in my trading. My thinking logically leads me to the concept of relative volume; i.e not just volume by itself but in comparison to an established average or median; that can indicate/confirm volatility (or …