Following a trend is great. But if the trend is moving quickly, you want to know that so that you can get ahead of it. If the rate of change of the trend is going up, rising prices are going to follow quickly.

What we have been talking about is Momentum! Just like high school physics, momentum is the rate of change and is calculated by dividing the closing price today by the closing price ten days back and multiplying it by hundred.

This is your shockingly simple momentum indicator that you can use profitably in your trading. Now, if the price did not change, the momentum indicator will obviously will be 100. If the price went down, the momentum indicator will be less than 100 and if the price went up, the momentum indicator will be more than 100. Now, when the momentum indicator is greater than 100, the trend is expected to continue in the future.

Momentum is a leading indicator. It tells you what is likely to happen in the future not what happened in the past. Momentum trading is done with some attention to the fundamentals. When key business fundamentals like the sales or profits are accelerating at the same time the security price is going up, momentum is likely to continue.

Now, investors can also use momentum in their investing decisions. Momentum investors are looking for securities that are rising in prices especially if accompanies by acceleration in the underlying growth. The knock on momentum investing is that instead of buying low and selling high, your goal is to buy high and sell even higher.

What a momentum investor is looking for is a security that is going to move big. But this move big is going to happen on a long term horizon instead of a few days. The expectation is to make money on the longer term. The thought is that if the security is starting to go up in price, it will keep going up in prices unless something dramatic happens to change. In the meantime, you can make a lot of money.

Now just like price momentum that we have been talking about above, we can calculate the earnings momentum. Earning momentum is the province of the investors. The investor looks at the quarterly earnings of the company to see if it is going up at a faster pace say from a steady pace of 10% a year to 12% or 15% and so on. If the earnings growth rate is going up what this means is that the underlying price is also going to accelerate.

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