The Wiley Trader's Advantage is a new series of concise, highly focused books designed to keep savvy futures, options, stocks, bonds, and commodities traders abreast of the latest, successful strategies and techniques used by the keenest minds in the business. Each title delivers timely cutting-edge guidance on a key aspect of trading, including trading systems, portfolio management methods, computerized forecasting, and systems optimization. In MESA and Trading Market Cycles, John Ehlers provides traders and professional speculators with the first full-length, definitive treatment on using MESA (Maximum Entropy Spectral Analysis) — the author's well-known and highly respected computerized trading system — and cyclical analysis to create and execute highly profitable forecasting and trading strategies. This practical book first validates the existence of market cycles by using analogies to physical phenomena and direct measurement. It then profiles the basic characteristics of cycles, and fully describes traditional moving averages, momentum functions, and indicators from the cyclic perspective. From here, the author focuses on MESA, explaining how it works, how it compares to Fast Fourier Transform, and how traders can use its high-resolution spectral estimates to consistently pinpoint and exploit market cycles and trends. For maximum advantage, MESA and Trading Market Cycles walks readers through realistic trading examples that demonstrate the precision and utility of MESA under widely varying market conditions. Throughout, it supplies professional-level guidance on tuning momentum and moving average functions to measured cycles; relating cycle primitives to traditional charting patterns and imbuing them with new meaning; deciding when to use cycles for trading and when to avoid them; and differentiating between tradeable cyclic content, trending activities and seasonal factors. The first book to combine cycles, technical analysis, and MESA, this vital guide sh