What Are Your Favourite Charting Tools / Technical Indicators?

I've just been reading an interesting post over on the Marketclub blog entitled 'Which Charting Tools Do You Count On?' It's basically a poll asking the readers which technical indicators (and charting tools) they use the most, and the results are quite interesting.

At the time of writing 1534 people have voted and the indicator that appears to be the most widely used is the tried and tested moving average indicator, with 77% of people using this indicator in their trading. The next most popular indicator, or tool in this instance, was trendlines (53%), followed by stochastics (46%), RSI (46%), volume (44%) and bollinger bands (40%).

I'm not surprised by these results as I use moving averages, RSI and stochastics in both my forex trading and my share trading, and volume is obviously a very popular indicator amongst share traders. However I'm surprised to see that so many people use bollinger bands because I've never found this indicator to be that useful, and I don't know one successful trader who incorporates this indicator into their trading system.

I personally would also have voted for the Supertrend and Smoothed Repulse indicators but these options were not available. It's hardly surprising because very few people actually use them, and they're not even included in some of the more popular charting software such as MT4, for example.

One final point I want to make is that I think the writer of this post has made a big mistake in omitting one of the most popular indicators - the MACD indicator. I think this indicator would have been right up there in the 70-80% region, and may even have topped the list, but for some reason it wasn't even included in this list of options. There was also no mention of support and resistance or price action either, as one of the blog commentators rightly mentioned.

So although it was quite an interesting poll on the whole, it could have been a lot better if the writer had included some more indicators and tools in the list of options.