The Art and Science of Technical Analysis: Market Structure, Price Action, and Trading Strategies

The best book I’ve read on technical analysis. The format, content, and explanations are top notch. Mr. Grimes has written a road map that any trader can use to develop and deploy a solid trading strategy. I like that he teaches an approach that supports looking at charts from multiple views and time frames. Looking forward to using his book to refine my system, develop others, and employ them during the next down market, which will be the true test of how well I’ve learned to apply what this book contains.

Adam has done a fantastic job of sharing his many insights into trading. This is one of those “must have’s” in your trading library. It becomes a reference book and the type you read the first time and then consume the second, third, and fourth. I have used many of the suggestions to tighten up my trading plan. Reading this book had an immediate and positive impact on my trading results. You don’t have to agree with everything (so get over those type of reviews – its not why books are written) – but at the very least least Adam’s thoughts will stimulate your own.

Fantastic! Thank goodness there are traders out there willing to share. When you finish reading this book read Mark Minervini’s,Gil Morales’, then reread WIlliam O’Neil’s. It’s the trading trifecta!

Best book ever but been mindfully if you are completely new to trading you will won’t understand I suggest you get your basic knowledge of trading first then buy this only one book to build muscle to your trading. Thanks 👍 I love it

Rather than trying to cover everything of technical analysis, Adam focuses on interpreting the basic information in a very artistically and scientifically way. Some parts are pleasantly lengthy but I find them very entertaining. The title says it all!!!

Bottom line: If you are looking for a complete encyclopedia of technical analysis, this is not for you. If you are looking for something that is basic but powerful and efficient, then go ahead and give it a read.

Grimes provides nothing less than a complete methodology for analyzing price action. His book is exhaustive and rigorous but organized in such a meticulous manner that there’s refreshing simplicity to his presentation, which is just crystal clear on every topic. Grimes is willing to acknowledge and confront the issue of randomness with careful consideration, which I think is something most traders would often rather not acknowledge. It’s alarming how frequently EMH is either ignored or casually dismissed in trading literature. The very notion of price randomness was a full-on system-shock to my psychology early in my trading days. If you are new trader, deal with it, and deal with it early. This book will hep with that and will absolutely refine your thinking. It’s a gift and it may frankly be the best primer on Technical Analysis ever written. I have never read anything better.

Been trading for about 4 years and have read numerous books, watched webinars and took classes. Although there is a lot to learn and absorb, the main problem I have encountered is an organized and logical presentation of trading concepts. Adams book is by far the best I have read in putting the market in context where I can make sense of the trading puzzle.

His teaching of random markets, (the majority of times), with how to recognize supply and demand imbalance opportunities,(at certain times), is an eye opener. My trading has improved immensely and for the first time I have a sense that consistent profitability in the market is possible with identifying, under-standing and internalizing your “edge”.

There is a saying, “When the pupil is ready the teacher will appear”. If your ready, Adam Grimes is a great teacher. I highly recommend this book.

The Art and Science of Technical Analysis is one of the best trading books I have read. It is a deep, insightful book with ideas and trading methods that are applicable to all trading time frames. Importantly, rigorous quantitative testing backs all of the trading strategies and patterns discussed. Additionally, there is an entire section of the book that discusses and provides several examples of how trading patterns fail. This is critical to understand and something not seen in many (if any) other trading books.

Adam also has a 100% free trading course (over 30 hours) that is also outstanding (available on his blog). If you are a serious trader/investor (whether beginner or experienced), I would highly recommend exploring this valuable free resource that Adam has created. It is a great complement to the book and helps cement (as well as build on) the ideas discussed in his book.

Adam Grimes is an underrated personality in the technical analysts arena. I wish I had discovered his body of work earlier.

If you are serious about learning, buy his books, take his free online course, do his homework assignments. You will inevitably learn to trade. I’ve been busy devouring his content, and I can attest that I am miles ahead of where I was before I discovered him just 90 days ago.

My only complaint is that his book “The Art and Science…” is printed on the most inexpensive paper there is. I guess this is a minor, superficial detail. It is just that the contents of the book are so valuable that they ought to have been printed on top shelf paper.

This book is definitely recommanded for beginners. It will put you in the right track right from the start. I can see that this book came from someone with experience, who is really trying to make things easy for beginners.

After you are done with this, you can concentrate on expanding your repertoirs and branch out in all kinds of directions. Lots of beginner books just don’t give you a unified framework for analyzing charts. This book does. A unified framework isn’t absolutely necessary, but it makes chart analysis easier. Most other books teach you many bits and pieces, or concentrate on an endless series of chart patterns or indicators, which is alright, but not ideal.

I had a bit of back and forth with the author on social media and he seems like a smart guy. Among other companies, he has worked at SMB Capital, a highly renowned daytrading firm. In that sense, I trust that this book comes from experience.

Undoubtedly, human-powered, individual technical trading, as the author introduces The Art and Science, is hard. Take this review with that in mind – I expect no significant expertise in the field to come or be easy and this is not a critique on literary excellence or factual depth.

What bothers me about the book is that paring back the nearly infinite number of variables that is the aggregate of instantaneous market action and the resultant seas of technical stock data to say, a purely arbitrary and relatively paltry fifteen hundred or five hundred or one hundred (insert your own number here; it matters little), and then expecting to apply even half a hundred technical analysis tools to that insurmountable data on Grime’s other early stated basis – which is to spend a little over a second for each chart view across 500 stocks in a single sitting – is simply mathematically impossible.

I’m 100 pages deep in the book and already I find a baffling number of technical advice hedges and counter-advice, which tells me what I as a novice trader already knew: There is such a sizable degree of complexity in what portends to be predictive trading that really the only way to make money is to climb aboard the overall market’s trend, assuming it has one at any one instant, and get in either long as it rises or short as it trends down. Again, assuming even that’s possible outside of guessing.

From Grimes website, quoting the book:

“It is critical that traders understand the subtleties of every tool they use. They should know how they react in every possible market environment, and furthermore, must understand the complex interactions between multiple tools. This may lead to an approach that disregards a lot of information that many traders assume to be useful, but, for instance, why would you use indicators that do not add to your analysis? Why would you listen to news that is old news and is already fully priced into the market? Why would you try to guess how complex fundamental factors might influence the price if you do not have the skills to fully understand those fundamentals?”

After you’ve used every tool you can, and after knowing how to react to every possible market environment, and after grasping every complex interaction between those multiple tools, how can you possibly BUT find all that information already priced into the market, I ask.

Like the book, this appears to be useful-appearing advice…but only theoretically. You cannot employ thirty or a hundred trading tools across those theoretical fifteen hundred candlesticks and trend variables – or five hundred or whatever number of them you care to use – and then compare to even five of Grime’s innumerable observations and do it either efficiently or with some reasonable degree of success. All that data takes all day to examine but a portion of and you’re still back to that slim percentage of daily or hourly winners versus losers.

Therefore what Grimes has done in The Art and Science is indeed to compile a comprehensive view of so-called technical analysis, but it is not, in sum, anything approaching a knowledge set that lends to it use as anything other than an encyclopedia of rather unassociated raw observations, each hedged against the other such that no real patternability is ever proved except by relative chance. Less than an encyclopedia, it is like “analyzing” the weather to find it comprised of chaotic “patterns” from which you can divine scant order and from scant order, virtually no predictability, and then writing the points down, each more or less notated as a rough guess.

Unless you are a weather supercomputer, or in the markets an algorithm, it’s impossible. I look at the calendar to more or less know that on average it’ll be warmer in summer. I look at the DOW and S&P now to know I’ll lose money when I’m in at the wrong time and place.

Art and Science is an exhaustive reference work to allow you to use hindsight to perhaps label what just happened with a term that will just as likely fail to apply the next time that phenomenon appears to prepare to occur again. It could be an different “pattern” emerging entirely, one that undoubtedly Grime’s book will, in some other of its many chapters, elaborate upon.

A few things are certain: Chaotic systems occur, markets are indeed efficient, and stock traders eventually end up writing books for a reason. Kudos to Grimes for a comprehensive work, one written pleasantly and readably.

The Art and Science has a use. I just can’t figure out what it might be. Have I just called technical trading impossible? I suppose I have and that’s not Grime’s fault; it’s mine. It’s just that below a certain point you can’t call diced onion, diced onion anymore. You have to demonstrate some degree of feasibility to call anything art and science instead of a thousand ways to throw darts at the board.

First the qualifier: if you are a beginning trader / investor, you will probably be confused unless you obtain basic understanding of technical analysis first. You should be, at least, basically familiar with concepts of support / resistance, trends, rudimentary candlestick charting, basic moving averages, and MACD. This book is really designed for experienced individual investors, money managers, and institutional investors. It is hard for me to quantify this prerequisite, because I have studied many books over the years on investing and trading. That being said, among the many, The Art and Science of Technical Analysis really stands out. I started out with the book and a highlighter and now have a book filled with yellow pages.

Several months have lapsed since I purchased The Art and Science of Technical Analysis. I waited long enough to complete the book cover to cover and begin incorporating the principles into my own trading. The reason I originally purchased was to learn how to obtain better entries for my trades. I received that, and more. I am a visual trader, and most of the books I have read on swing trading were based on moving averages, overbought/oversold indicators, trend lines, or some form of channels. Author Adam Grimes reinforces the use market structure to understand the forces of supply and demand which lie beneath the chart. Simple is better, and Grimes, a supreme analytical, has used quantitative analysis to back test many of the earmarks of technical analysis and found that many, at least from his research, offer no statistical edge over a large enough sample size.

His basic premise is that markets are, in fact, random most of the time. There will be little argument here from the academics. However, human nature being what it is, there are instances when price extremes occur due to greed or panic among enough participants of that market or instrument to provide trading opportunities (early 2016, for example). Grimes helps the trader establish an edge in that environment.

Much of the information in the book may not be entirely new, but at least for me, Grimes presented a different way of looking at it. And many of the facts and axioms I had assumed as true, because I had been taught that they were true, may not stand the test of time. I saw new ways of seeing support and resistance, finding than many lines drawn on charts are actually random. Moving averages are useful for mean reversion, or possibly identifying trend direction or integrity, but they do not offer real support or resistance- they are broken about as often as they hold.

One of the most useful concepts in this book, which I thought I knew but really didn’t, was how to use multiple time frames for trade qualification and entry/exit execution. I have been following multiple time frames since I read “Trading for a Living” by Alexander Elder, but Grimes refined for me ways to do it more visually, which is more fitting to my particular style.

While Elder’s book was also one of the best books I have read on swing trading, “The Art and Science of Technical Analysis” was better suited to my style and personality due to the visual nature and less reliance on mathematical indicators. It is the one book I keep nearby for re-analysis.

It’s the best book by far, and I can say that since I’ve read more than 20 books of trading. Why didn’t Grimes write it before? I study it for 15 minutes every day -I,m in the nineth review- Every trade I take I first read the book’s pattern that should fit it.
Said that, however there’s an important thing I’m concerned about: due to the quality of the text, I signed up the website he advises, but there, he doesn’t prescribe his medicine. Only in a month with his tips I’ve lost 400 euros (I’m spanish) and more important he doesn’t apply what he sais in his book.
In addition I miss a further explanation with the indicators where you can find some contradictions.

Grimes’ work, and make no mistake, this IS a “work”, is as close to as good as it can honestly get in this genre. While written in simple accessible style, this is no breezy weekend read. One of the most sage bits of advice comes right at the start: when finished, go back and study certain chapters again.

The reader that will get the MOST out of this contribution, in my view, is someone who already has a bit of mud on their boots from the trenches. In the appendix he provides a “Primer” aimed at the novice. But it is SO basic (how to place an order) that the gesture seems more to mollify an anxious publisher’s jacket writer than serve the book’s main audience. If you just now got the “what are orders” part down, the take-homes of the book will be pretty fuzzy for awile. And the extra burdens of interpretation and active management a bit much to expect. There are other more full length primers out there. A (precious) few quite good.

This book is different. And that is what makes it special. While it IS a fairly comprehensive trading overview, the FOCUS of the book is interpreting and acting on largly uncluttered price action. Few books, even on technical analysis, narrow in on such a basic start point. And Grimes does so with organized, well expressed, non-contradictory prose. In other words, a treat.

Rather than remain safely high on cliche and low of detail, the book is rich with specific set-ups and engaging commentary.

Grounded in evidence based, probability founded science, it emphasizes the ART of making sense of it all. Of reasoned interpretation and discretionary decisions. This is refreshing. Many of the best books out there, as cognizant as Grimes of the disastrous effect of human nature, emotion and misjudgment, stress the opposite tact. The only hope is creating an “objective” testable system that marginalizes faulty judgment and emotion. The fact of the matter is, subjective opinion’s effects are STILL and always, everywhere. The day that ends – no more market. Yet each tiny choice changes each participant’s outcome. Gaining a lasting TRUE edge is key. Yet, given the high degree of randomness, this is extraordinarily illusive and very hard work.

Faced with this sober reality, his own approach is that of a swing trader. But in the more accurate, not popular sense. I recently put down Dave Landry’s Layman’s Guide. Both look at simplified price action and quite similar initial set-ups. Both advocate swing trading expectation (at least initially) and grabbing partial profit quite early. Where they DIVERGE in goals and trade management I find quite stimulating. Read!

I will just say Landry’s hybrid swing-trend blend SEEMS the more logical. A great compromise. The purer swing style coached by Grimes however is certainly more instinctual. More importantly it SEEMS the more realistic and prudent. Grimes makes you ask yourself how time-LIMITED a given entry set-up or bullish chart pattern is likely valid for. Dispite popular mantras, the more “miss than hit” challenge of PURE long term trend trading (enduring deep drawdowns that MUST be made up by sufficient extraordinary runs), is easier said than done. Especially in our times. Grimes’ insight, no, the very market structure he helps YOU see evolving, is like having a probability gauge, however slight, as you navigate your OWN way through the wall of fog known as the right margin.

Reviewers offering NOTHING but accolades can be suspected (sometimes with reason) to be the author’s mom or of his/her customer fan base. So here are two knocks. Sorry son: First. He suggests short and long versions of much of the book’s preferred patterns would basically be mirror images. Flip them and away you go. Really? Sometimes no doubt. But the implications and thus psychology can be dramaticaly different. Affecting the volatility and compression of the action. And therefore “how it go’na look”. Especially around possible signifigant tops and bottoms.

2nd “beef”: Record such a detailed personal Trading Diary that you include EVERYTHING right down to “what you had for breakfast”?? For future result analysis? I nearly choked on my cheerios, blurting: “Give me a break Adam!” Indeed elsewhere he echoes Nassim Taleb about the tendency of humans to see correlations and patterns where there are none. Such a tendency provides an endless boon for “the industry” and an ever present risk for traders. In equal measure. Yes yes his POINT is okay: As we are the main part of our trading equation: know thy state and self (warily).

Truly digesting THIS WORK, a diary can expect to show not only improved performance correlation but whetted appetite for MORE such nourishing fare. As the author would agree, no book is “all you need”. It never is. But for this one’s refreshingly GROUNDED discussions on SEEING risk and recognizing possibley superior set-ups at that hard right edge: My first 5 stars. Sail On!