Technical Analysis: Power Tools for Active Investors

This book covers relative strength indicators, chart patterns, Moving averages, rate of change, seasonal investing ….and more, including MACD. The discussion on MACD alone is worth the price of the book in my view. It is much much more than a discussion of crosses above and below the signal line. Get advice from the guy who invented it! It also covers trading channels and ends with a chapter on Putting it all together, or how to organise your market strategies. Its very good stuff, from a market professional, and I highly recommend it. The chart illustrations are very clear and easy to follow, unlike many trading books today, which can often be sloppy, ill defined, and hard to read. I pull this off the shelf again and again for frequent refreshers.

Very good book. Easy to follow.

Yes, yet another poorly backtested TA book. How is that people expect ad hoc or at best linear indicators to predict the markets? This guy invented macd (just a glorified smoothed out version of the second derivative of price, nothing more than that) and the book has a chapter on it – nothing deep, usual TA level nonsense.

Gerald uses an easy to read and casual writing style with meaningful insight into technical analysis.
He builds your confidence as you work through the book and eventually you become empowered enough to work effectively within the USA equity markets.
This book has helped me create my trading system that is producing a successful trading account currently and will allow me to make necessary trading system changes into the future.
The years of work outlined in this book along with substantial backtesting create real power tools for investors now and into the future.

If longevity is a key to greatness, Gerald Appel has achieved it. When I got into the business in the mid-seventies, he was an admired technical analyst. His publication, Systems and Forecast, was required reading. The inventor of MACD, he has lived to see his technique used by virtually every serious investor and trader; it is included in most trading programs.

With Technical Analysis, this accomplished technician and money manager, offers a complete course in forecasting future market behaving using cyclical, trend, momentum and volume signals.

His techniques are suitable for investors of all suits – be they short-, intermediate- or long-term. Even mutual fund investors will benefit.

It is rare that a successful money manager of Appel’s stature shares his secrets with the public. If you are a serious investor or trader, you can only benefit from time spent with this master and his ideas.

This book lays out several strategies with varying levels of difficulty to implement. The pros and cons, historical returns, and instructions are given for each strategy. The author is also the inventor of the MACD trading indicator.

very useful information for practitioners.

Damn good book.

excellent book.

In my opinion, the title of this book should be “Topics in Technical Analysis”. This book covers some aspects of technical anaysis and each part is very wellwritten. Especially MACD is well covered than any other book in TA. A good source for intermediate and advanced readers.

Buried in this book are clues that point to widespread misconceptions about the MACD.

The clues are
1. Hints at not waiting for the MACD lines to cross to start buying
2. A calculation of MACD Histogram that is different than most, but not all, charting websites and software
3. Suggestions on circumstances to slow down and sometimes skip MACD sell signals

Experienced traders may spot the differences between Appel’s approach in this book and what is often bandied about regarding the MACD. I think it would have been even more helpful if the author had addressed the differences and pointed out any common misconceptions directly. Having done some backtesting of the MACD, I think the book needs more specific, objective details on how to anticipate MACD lines crossing and recommendations for using the MACD histogram or Appel’s histogram, as I have come to call his way of plotting it.

I reckon that reading the book years ago and thoroughly understanding the nuances of how Gerald Appel uses the MACD would have helped me, especially in 2007. Since then, I’ve seen the value of backtesting. The good news is that many sections of this book show historical test results. However, I was a little disappointed not to find backtesting results for the MACD in this book. Test data is rarely included in trading texts so it is probably a bonus to get the data that is presented in this book.

The author emphasizes synergy and gives specific instructions for using other market-timing power tools — along with the MACD and sometimes even without the MACD. In fact, the MACD is only one chapter. But MACD is why I came to the book and I suspect many other readers do the same, so that’s where I focused most of this review.

Besides the MACD, the book has instructions on key indicators of market internals and health. It also gives rules of thumb for estimating duration and extent of market moves, using chart patterns, and it covers moving average channels.

Bottom line: Worth reading to get the benefit of the experience of Gerald Appel, the man who invented the MACD and has seen a lot more than the current boom/bust cycle.

The content of this book is very usefull for middle to experienced traders. Gerald has a very clear approach and written information, with useful hints on Technical Analysis. He starts with a Mutual funds analysis and evaluation overview. Very useful for the ones are managing funds or are planning to do so. After it, he goes to some new Chart readings and a lot of analysis over historical stock indexes. He cover some traditional charting readings as triangle, Head and shoulders and others. He explainings about market cycles, T Formations on charts to preview end of cycles and the MACD chapter, itself, it’s a mandatory read to the ones who apply MACD on their daily analysis. He presents MACD with different timeframes and reading with 2 o 3 different MACDs to initiate and finalize trades, very usefull ans interesting. In the end of each chapter, he prepared an resume of all the chapter and its hints…very nice and fast for consulting….It’s a nice book for reading and consulting over the years.