A Short Course in Technical Trading teaches proven long- and short-term trading techniques (with an emphasis on short-term), covering basic indicators and how you can best use them to your advantage. This Book includes a trading game so you can trade along with the lessons, posing likely problems that you’ll encounter once trading begins. As trading becomes more complicated, so do the problems.
Author’s Introduction:
Trading is all about making money. Technical trading uses chart patterns, indicators, some simple math, and clear rules to make money. There are many successful traders who use instinct, but I believe they’ve got a computer going inside their heads, looking for patterns and signals that tell them prices are going to surge ahead or stop and reverse. Experience teaches you what works and what doesn’t work.
In this course we’re going to take some simple ideas and turn them into successful trading. If you can’t turn an idea into profitable returns, then you’re wasting your time. Trading is really all about making money. Using technical analysis is an unbiased way of evaluating a stock, index, or futures market. If the price is going down, it doesn’t matter if the analyst is reporting that the company is undervalued, or that the pro forma performance shows a potential profit in six months—the timing is not right to buy.
However, technical analysis isn’t enough. It doesn’t tell you how to trade. There is a big gap between analyzing the market and trading, and it is filled with trading losses. How can you bridge that gap without making every mistake yourself? You can learn from someone with experience. Good advice moves you along faster, but making mistakes yourself is an important and unavoidable way to learn. This course is intended to do both—teach you what works and give you a chance to make mistakes without costing you anything.
You’ll find traditional instruction alternating with “words of wisdom,” a series of trading games that I encourage you to play, and comments on what is likely to go wrong when you trade. Those comments are the result of reviewing the trading of other ambitious students. We can learn from their mistakes in order to make fewer mistakes of our own. I’ve been developing trading systems for 30 years, traded them myself, and directed others while they were being traded. I’ve profited from their successes and lost when they failed. By now I have a good understanding of what works and what doesn’t work, and why. This course is an effort to pass on that knowledge to you.
In case you’re thinking that this is a magical method for profitable trading, you’re wrong. There are no secrets in this course, just sensible methods and hard work. You should be able to take what you learn and use it as a solid foundation for moving forward, or you can trade successfully using only what you learned in this course.
Contents:
- 1. Timing Is Everything
- 2. Charting the Trend
- 3. Breakout Trends
- 4. Calculating the Trend
- 5. The Trading Game
- 6. Channels and Bands
- 7. Event-Driven Trends
- 8. Controlling the Risk of a Trade
- 9. One-Day Chart Patterns and Reversals
- 10. Continuation Patterns
- 11. Top and Bottom Formations
- 12. Retracements, Reversals, Fibonacci Numbers, and Gann
- 13. Volume, Breadth, and Open Interest
- 14. Momentum and MACD
- 15. Overbought/Oversold Indicators and Double Smoothing
- 16. Managing Your Entry and Exit
- 17. Volatility and Portfolio Management
- 18. Dow Theory
A Short Course in Technical Trading By Perry J. Kaufman PDF