Chart Your Way to Profits: The Online Trader's Guide to Technical Analysis with ProphetCharts, Second Edition

Introduction

One of my favorite photographs was taken by my wife on our honeymoon. We were on the second leg of our trip, the first of which was in Dubrovnik, Croatia (part of the former Yugoslavia), and the second in central Italy. The photo shows me in bed, apparently asleep. The title of the book I am holding across my chest is clearly legible: Technical Analysis of Stock Trends, by Edwards and Magee.

Charting the financial markets has been my passion for over 20 years. The very first trade I ever placed in my life was on Black Monday, the crash of 1987—hardly a propitious start. But the markets and their vagaries have fascinated me ever since.

In 1992, I took my three main areas of interest—computers, trading, and business—and combined them to create Prophet Financial Systems. That was before the commercial Internet even existed (we used dial-up modems in those days for daily data updates). Over the years, we built a wide array of tools, all with the purpose of trying to help people make better trading decisions.

To be honest, I personally find books about technical analysis kind of boring. They are full of indicators, formulas, tables, and numbers. By and large, they put me to sleep (witness the honeymoon photo). I set out to make this book different. I wanted you to enjoy learning from this book, and I wanted to use as many real-life examples as possible. Hypothetical charts mean little, in my opinion. So you will find this book packed with hundreds of examples drawn from real ...