In 1968, a Japanese journalist named Goichi Hosada published a new method to forecast and trade the markets called the Ichimoku Kinko Hyo or 'one glance balanced cloud chart.' Its development had actually begun before World War II, but it wasn’t completed until 1968 — about a decade before the introduction of the moving average convergence-divergence indicator (MACD).

The indicator is a trend-trading method designed to capture the lion’s share of an advance or decline and is typically applied to daily or weekly charts using using the traditional Ichimoku Cloud settings. However, there are ways to apply certain filters that can increase the approach’s accuracy. We will focus on applying the method to intraday time frames, particularly the one-hour chart.