Technical Analysis Plain and Simple: Charting the Markets in Your Language, Second Edition

Prove It!

There are a lot of widely accepted beliefs in both technical and fundamental analysis with regard to what moves markets. Oil prices rising? Bad for stocks. Interest rates falling? Good for stocks. Technology stocks always lead rallies. Wars? People get nervous and conservative and don’t buy stocks.

However, correlation studies that simply show how one market or event leads another show that many of these holy grails are not quite true. This is a topic deserving of its own book, so we’ll set it aside and leave behind a warning not to believe everything you read, especially when it comes to why markets are doing what they are doing. Healthy skepticism will keep the average investor from making a lot of mistakes.