business and investing

As a brief introduction of myself, I have passed CFA Program. In my opinion, you can't make money by reading ANY book on Technicals or Fundamentals. In Stock Market, thought Process is THE sought-after thing. Much of the theories in fundamentals or technicals contain some assumptions. All or some of these may not be true. So decision-making lies in the valuation of stock considering the noise in such theories.

I used to be ardent follower or Technical Analysis. But after 3 years of experience, though in a smaller market, I now strongly believe that Technicals don't have any foot-hold of their own. These only move with the Fundamentals.

I have read this book. On the whole I found this a great book. The reason that I have given 3 stars is not about the book that remain below my expectations, but it's about the Technical Analysis that actually remained below my expectations!!!

Regards,

This text is well known and required by the MTA for its CMT program. Its author is well studied and an expert at technical analysis and has a good historical approach. HOWEVER, his writing style is horrid. I am a fully licensed securities professional and have done technical analysis for a considerable amount of time. Even when I know what he is trying to say I personally find it almost impossible to understand some of his paragraphs. Throw in some typographical errors and some paragraphs are too obtuse to bother trying to decipher. Further, the charts in this book are not the best. They are all so compressed his examples are difficult to find and seldom marked. Its hard to find the early part of a year when the whole year is about an tenth of an inch. Buy this book if you have to or if you can read his style easily that you see in the sample provided. If not there are equally good books on the same subject out there.

This book has become one of the classics for the beginning technical analyst, and is one of the two texts set for the first level of the Chartered Technical Analyst exam. I'm working my way through it, but I've found myself as frustrated as informed. Certainly you will find some information about almost every technical indicator that you will hear about in the press or on the web, but the attempt to be comprehensive means that the treatment of many issues is cursory at best.
Worst of all, though, is the almost total absence of editing in the first half of the book. Some random examples - the RSI formula is misstated, the text refer to charts that don't exist, charts are mislabelled (e.g a Microsoft chart labelled as WalMart). One important table has the column headings offset by one column. The accompanying workbook suffers from the same problem (e.g reversing answers to multiple choice questions). And to add insult to injury, the book is falling apart! Martin Pring's contributions to technical analysis is unquestioned - unfortunately the poor editing and presentation of this expensive book does poor service to his reputation.