RRG benchmarks

SandraLee

Interesting post in Julius De Kempenaer's blog about using $ONE as benchmark for RRG of currencies. Would you ever use $ONE as the benchmark when looking at stocks?

markd

Chart School explains that $ONE plots the inverse of any symbol.

stockcharts.com/school/doku.php?st=%24one&id=chart_school:index_symbols:pseudo_symbols


As I understand the article, $ONE can be used to more easily compare the relative strength of a variety of currencies against the US dollar (or any other base currency), so that if you own the dollar and want to be in a different currency you can more readily choose the the strongest. You need the $ONE because currencies only have value relative to each other and the existing conventional pairs make comparison difficult.

Stocks on the other hand, already have a common yardstick, namely the currency they trade in (e.g., IBM is $151, XOM is $90), so they can be compared directly to each other.
If you own IBM and want to know if you should own XOM instead, you can chart XOM:IBM.
Or, you can can compare either symbol to a benchmark index like $SPX.

So, I don't think there is a need to use $ONE when comparing stock investment alternatives. But, maybe there are more creative minds out there who know things I don't.

Julius_RRG

Sorry to be so late with my reply

You can actually use $ONE as a benchmark when looking at stocks. What you are then doing is looking at absolute price performance and not relative performance.

Your RRGs will not be evenly distributed around a benchmark anymore but the securities in a universe will be skewed and clustered.

Say the market is in an uptrend, running an RRG for US sectors against $ONE will show you most, if not all, of them inside the leading quadrant as they are all going up
You may still be able to get some (trading) ideas or early warning signals from that as it will still show you the interaction of all members of the universe on one chart !

Look at this RRG for sectors here

Hope this helps, Julius

IND

Hi Julius. I'm relatively new to Stockcharts so I just read your July12/17 blog on using RRG with currencies and $one as benchmark. Very timely for me and extremely useful. Thanks for your insight. Ivan. Canada.