Recommend me a Technical Analysis book

[DcifrThs]

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“I realized that technical analysis didn’t work when I turned the chart upside down and
didn’t get a different answer.”

Warren Buffett



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Read "The Intelligent Investor" instead.

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another vote for NOT reading TA here:

benoit mandelbrot's MMAR is able to produce price change and asset price charts that fool people into seeing patterns.

he believes, and i agree, that human beings are built to try to find patterns in life and in charts. thus technical analysts come about claiming (and having) success by following patters in markets.

these "chartists" as BM calls them, are the but of many jokes he's played on them as they've found support levels, varying degrees of trends (some unbelieveably long), and other TA type factors from charts he generated with his (completely randomly seeded) model.

the point he tries to make is that the markets are so random as to make chartists useles..

now, that being said, he has acknowledged the surprising ability for chartists to make money, as do i since one logical explanation for it does come to mind: if 100% of the market followed charts and acted on them, that woudl move the market. if 0 people did it obviously it woud have no affect.

so 2 things can be going on 1) enough participants can be doing it (TA) so that the results are then reinforced by the participants; and 2) there might be a very complex hand behind movement of "chartists success" that does not converge and is constantly changing just like variance of price charts (variance doesn't converge for the most part). so this change might be very slow and we may be in a boom of technical analysts success right now that may not continue or be successful itno the future.

this 2nd one can be going on now, but may not be expected to persist into the future.

thus, i prefer to put my money behind logic and reason vs. chartists that can be fooled by a 100% random model and their historical results.

Barron