Analysis: Australian miners dig for precious new commodity cash(Reuters)

 

Once darlings of the Australian mining boom, small and middle-tier prospectors are now running low on cash as commodities markets lose their lustre, pushing miners to look near and far for funds to keep afloat. (Reuters)

INDICATORS. Alligator.

Like the Gator oscillator, the Alligator indicator was also developed by Larry Williams. The indicator utilizes the convergence and divergence of three Smoothed Moving Averages to generate trade decisions. The indicator is designed to detect the beginning and exhaustion of trends from which it generates trade decisions; accordingly the indicator will typically perform poorly in ranging markets.

How  to trade signals.

Like the Gator oscillator the Alligator indicator is traded off the basis of the trend life cycle.

• When the Alligator’s Lips line crosses the other lines from above traders should look to take short positions. When the Lips line crosses the other lines from below traders will look to initiate a long position (Alligator awakening). These trades should be placed after a sleeping phase.
• When the lines are moving together in unison the position will be held (Alligator eating with mouth wide open).
• When the lines converge together to a smaller area and begin to cross the trend has run its course, and traders will look to cover their position (Alligator Sated).

• When the lines stay inter-twined moving closely around each other the Alligator is sleeping and traders should remain on the sidelines until another awakening phase ensues. The Alligator indicator being a system based on moving averages will suffer from similar weaknesses as the Gator oscillator. The lag in moving average signals can render them ineffectual in whippy trendless markets; therefore it is advisable to deploy the Alligator and Gator with other trend confirming indicators such as the MACD indicator.