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John Bollinger

John Bollinger (b. 1950): analyst and money manager, inventor of the bands that bear his name — the adaptive volatility channel that replaced fixed-percentage envelopes.

On this page

Bollinger on Bollinger Bands (2001): "The bands do not give signals: they provide a relative definition of high and low."
Period b. 1950
Role Analyst (CFA and CMT), founder of Bollinger Capital Management
Lens Volatility
Key work Bollinger on Bollinger Bands (2001)

Who he is

Portrait — John Bollinger

A cameraman turned analyst, Bollinger was for years the technical face of Financial News Network (later CNBC). In the early 1980s he faced a practical problem: envelopes around averages used fixed percentages, identical in calm markets and hysterical ones. His solution — margins proportional to the recent standard deviation — produced a channel that adapts by itself to the volatility regime. He is among the few indicator inventors who also wrote the instructions against abusing his own tool.

Contribution

  • Bollinger Bands — SMA 20 ± 2 standard deviations: the first adaptive, statistical definition of relative "high" and "low".
  • %b and Bandwidth — the derived indicators: where price sits inside the bands, and how wide the bands are. From the second comes the squeeze diagnosis.
  • Relative high and low, never absolute — the touch of a band is not a signal: it is a question put to the context. His insistence on this point is a small treatise in intellectual honesty about indicators.
  • Rational analysis — his label for the union of technical and fundamental analysis: categories serve books, not portfolios.

What today's students learn from him

  1. The best tools adapt to the regime instead of assuming the market is always the same.
  2. An indicator's creator is the first source to read about its limits: no one knows better the ways the tool deceives.
  3. Volatility is an autonomous dimension of the market, deserving its own measurement — the same lesson as Wilder's ATR, arrived at by the statistical route.

Study path

In preparation — This entry will be extended with %b, Bandwidth and the W/M patterns of *Bollinger on Bollinger Bands*. The operational entry: bollinger-bands.

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