This "Letter to Stocks&Commodities magazine" appears on pages 14 and 15 of the October 2002 issue of "Technical Analysis of Stocks & Commodities Magazine."

Editor,

As a relatively new subscriber, I've found your magazine to be invaluable in my education about daytrading stocks and about the markets in general. Relatiing to the article "Trading IBM Intraday" by Dennis Meyers in the June 2002 S&C, however, I have several comments.

First, this article is presented in an esoteric manner and never gives details as to how the "system" works. It gives references to other places where the reader can find more information - but these places are not easy to access, particularly sitting in front of your computer, reading S&C, and wanting to test strategies presented.

Second, the sidebar "Mathematics" presents theory, but no details, as to how this type of system is implemented.

Third, in the Traders' Tips section of that issue, Marge Sherald of Ward Systems addresses Meyers' article. First, she mentions that the article provides insufficient information for the reader to implement (as noted above in my comments). Then, she goes on to present an unrelated neural net system that gives completely different results (better, of course!), and only vaguely refers back to the article for comparisons and benchmarks.

Fourth, again in Traders' Tips, page 79, Dion Kurczek presents results for Wealth-Lab using an EMA ("For simplicity's sake, we'll use the first order polynomial (an EMA) instead of the fourth order"), again providing a Traders' Tip that does not implement anything near to what the article was intended to present.

This article may be more appropriate for a mathematics magazine, since it does not present sufficient usable information for anyone to actually implement the system. Instead, the article presents a system that sounds like the holy grail for IBM (and by implication, applicable to "other markets or stocks"), and doesn't provide any means for the reader to test, modify, or apply the system. The system is not verifiable by the reader; all results presented must be accepted on faith. As such, I think it was a waste of space in your magazine. Your articles are generally targeted at the real-world trader (as they should be), not theoreticians.

Further, your Traders' Tips section should provide usable code and algorithms. I'm a TradeStation user, so EasyLanguage code would be nice, but code for any platform (MetaStock, eSignal, NeoTicker, etc.) provides the algorithms and calculations necessary, so that I can easily convert it to the format I need. Both of the Traders' Tips provided for this article, written by experts for their respective platforms, were unable to implement the system presented in the original article - and certainly, if these experts could not do it, then your typical reader will have no chance.

Thanks again for the great info you present each month. I read cover to cover.