Product Description

"Without question, some people have made astonishing amounts of money from studying share price charts and foretelling whether share prices would rise or fall. It is equally certain that further astonishing amounts of money have been lost in the same exercise." Alistair Blair

Charting is a complex and sometimes derided world, but one that nonetheless commands an enormous following. Some basic knowledge of charting is essential for any keen investor, and this fully revised and updated edition of Alistair Blair’s Guide to Charting is the independent, introductory overview of technical analysis for the private investor.

Guide to Charting

is packed with purpose-drawn charts and worked examples, and explains in detail how charting theories work. Written with the private investor’s viewpoint in mind the book’s coverage will give you all that you need to start practising technical analysis and, unlike other books on the subject, will also interest the more sophisticated, experienced practitioner by:

• Comparing technical analysis with fundamental analysis
• Examining the records of some of charting’s most renowned exponents
• Applying technical analysis to recent FTSE company price charts
• Providing alternative interpretations of ‘live’ charts
• Identifying both successful and failed recommendations by professional chartists

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #50001 in Books
• Published on: 2002-10-28
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Review

"The best introduction I've seen" - The Daily Telegraph, July 2006

"A thought-provoking book. If you're interested in investment you should read it whether you bracket chartism with astrology or not."
Sir Christopher Hogg, Chairman, Reuters

"Alistair Blair makes charting make sense. You'll soon discover why chartists believe 'the trend is your friend' and why this book should be your constant companion."
Matthew Vincent, Editor, Investors Chronicle

From the Back Cover

Charting is a complex and sometimes derided world, yet it still commands an enormous following. Some knowledge of the subject is useful for every investor. This fully revised and updated edition of Alistair Blair's Investor's Guide to Charting will bring you up to speed quickly, entertainingly and sometimes skeptically.

is packed with purpose-drawn charts and worked examples and explains in detail how charting theories work. Written with the private investor's viewpoint in mind, the book will give you all that you need to start practising technical analysis.

Learn what charts can and cannot show you, how and when to use them, and when to take them with a pinch of salt. Alistair Blair will get you thinking.

"A thought-provoking book. If you're interested in investment you should read it whether you bracket chartism with astrology or not."

Sir Christopher Hogg, Chairman, Reuters

"Alistair Blair makes charting make sense. You'll soon discover why chartists believe 'the trend is your friend' and why this book should be your constant companion."
Matthew Vincent, Editor, Investors Chronicle

About the Author

Alistair Blair is the No Free Lunch columnist for the Investors Chronicle magazine and writes about business and investment for many other publications. In 1999, he was voted the Periodical Publishers' Association’s Business Writer of the Year. After reading PPE at Oxford and completing an MBA at Manchester Business School, Alistair gained practical experience of the City by working at Hill Samuel and Fidelity.

Customer Reviews

Great introduction for the sceptics
The thing I liked most about this book was that the author, Alistair Blair, approached the subject with the same mindset as me, this can be best summed up as, "Yeah, right, charts tell you what happened in the past, not what is going to happen in the future". This theme of being an open minded sceptic is kept up all the way through the book. In other words he is not trying to convince you of his opinion that technical analysis is a fantastic way to make money, merely that there may be something in it, and, consequently, every investor should have some knowledge on the subject.

The book is laid out in a very logical order - a few chapters succinctly explaining the most commonly used signals showing times where they worked AND where they failed, biographies of investors who have made and lost fortunes through charting, some worked examples and finally practical advice about how technical analysis can be applied.

If you never knew anything about charting before, this book will allow you to go onto your favourite share trading website and suddenly understand what many of the different statistics and graphs mean. Whether it will improve your share trading performance, I'm sure the author would agree, is entirely up to you.

Charting heavy going
I found this book very heavy going and did not really understand the explanation of the technical terms used. Don't ask me what a MACD is.

Otherwise,the explanation of charting as a tool of investing was very interesting.

Good book -- for sceptics.
This is a strange book -- a book on charting written by a charting sceptic. Not only is Alistair Blair not a charting evangelist, but he is not even a believer!

Don't get me wrong, I'm as sceptical as they come, and this has been evident in my own books Stock Fundamentals On Trial : Do Dividend Yield, P/E and PEG Really Work? (which concludes that fundamental analysis is potentially flawed) and DON'T LOSE MONEY! (in the Stock Markets) (which treats preservation of capital as more important than making a killing in the markets), but here's the difference: my scepticism is implicit in the titles of those books.

Had Alistair's book been titled "The Sceptic's Guide to Charting", or "Charting: does it really work?" then I would have commended it wholeheartedly. But I can't help thinking that many pro-chartists will be disappointed to buy this book only for it to burst their bubble :-(

Tony Loton, author --
Financial Trading Patterns