Tools for testing the validity of stocks market indicators I need references on tools for testing the validity of technical analysis indicators on stocks market.
The tools I want could be anything, the technical analysis indicators are a list of values built from some stocks market parameters, such as price and volume - from these newly built indicators, there are some rules "if n happens, sell it, if b happens, buy it etc" these rules suposedly have "earning money" as their objective, is there something that could help me to test the connection between the rules and the objective?
 A: Now that the question is a little less vague I think I can guess at what you are driving at and give a suggestion.  Test you indicator using regression or correlation with the outcome they are suppose to predict.  If they lack correlation then by your terms they are not valid.
A: Why not backtest them against a benchmark (e.g. for US stocks, how did it compare to the S&P500 in terms of risk/return)? If the indicator requires past data like moving averages, or has numeric terms, just make sure you're only calculating on previous data using a rolling window function to avoid 'data snooping'.
Simplest way is to use a software package like R (or excel for simpler things) and have a dummy variable in your data that equals 1 for a long position, 0 for no position and -1 for a short position. Then you can run calculations like sum, mean and standard deviation on the log returns of the actual asset multiplied by this dummy variable; and compare it against your benchmark. If it 'beats the market', its worth investigating further while paying close attention to transaction costs/market depth (if there is very little liquidity at the historical price point, you would likely have gotten a much worse price as your trade would have affected the market price adversely).
