Before this magazine came together in the 1980s, trading and technical analysis were in a very different place in the financial industry than they are today. Fundamental analysis was the standard approach, while technical analysis was still considered exotic and suspect. Then personal computers were introduced, and a new era was born.
One of the few software products available in the early 1980s to help individual traders and investors perform technical analysis was CompuTrac, from a company of the same name run by Tim Slater. The CompuTrac software allowed for user studies to be added, which users could write in BASIC and for an Apple computer.
Jack Hutson, Technical Analysis of Stocks & Commodities magazine’s publisher and founder, had purchased a copy of the program, since he had an interest in the markets and technical analysis. Hutson had particular knowledge of fast Fourier transforms (FFT) at the time, having coded an FFT study in Fortran as part of an engineering project in college. Later, while employed as an engineer for The Boeing Co., he came back to that idea and began to work on it again, translating it to BASIC (remember that “all-purpose instruction code”?).
While he was doing so, he met Anthony Warren, the magazine’s first real contributor, later staff writer, who later became a good friend, at Boeing after a colleague suggested Warren might share an interest in this topic. Together, Hutson and Warren put together a routine to implement and interpret FFT. Warren, who had a doctorate in mathematics, coded the transform part, while Hutson coded the part of the study that preprocesses the data, which is required before an FFT can be applied. They adapted it to work in CompuTrac as a user study.