A webcast presentation by George Schade, Jr., CMT originally held on September 25th, 2013 as part of the CMT Association’s Educational Web Series.

How On Balance Volume came about is a story of multiple innovators, working independently, coming up with the same idea of relating volume to the direction of closing price by maintaining a cumulative total. The calculation was described in 1932 by Wall Street economist Paul Clay. In 1951, Frank Vignola and his wife Maude V. Woods, publishing in San Francisco, used OBV for stock trading. In 1948, Edward B. Gotthelf, a New York commodities trader, was using his “On-Balance Volume and Open Interest Method.” Until shown otherwise, we must believe these innovators did not know each other or of the others’ work. Joseph E. Granville claims that OBV came to him in 1961, but by then others had developed OBV.