Oscillator MACD - Tops and Bottoms by Robert Jackson

Question:
As you know, MACD is always bottoming or topping before crossing its trigger line.
However, the MACD signal comes always a bit late compared to price movement.
Is there any way to calculate the MACD first derivative function to identify MACD tops/bottoms, that could be use by the Explorer or the System Tester? -- Augustin Bataille,Belgium

Answer:
One way to do what you want would be using the 'Rate of Change' function.
For example:

RocPeriods:=1;
ROC(MACD(),RocPeriods,$)

or for the MACD histogram you would have

RocPeriods:=1;
ROC(MACD() - Mov(MACD(),9,E),RocPeriods,$)

If that is to noisy, you could smooth it a bit with:​

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Another way to do what you want would be to look for peaks and troughs using the 'Peak' and 'Trough' functions. I'm working on code to identify divergences using this method.

-- Dr. Robert Jackson
robert.jackson@utoronto.ca​

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