Gold Trading Boot Camp: How to Master the Basics and Become a Successful Commodities Investor

CHAPTER 16

Charts

I still have the original point-and-figure charts that I kept when I started in the industry working for Stanley Bell on the floor of the Commodities Exchange. I used special engineering graph paper so that the boxes were very small, and thus I could jam weeks of price action onto a single page. When I ran out of room, I would tape another sheet of graph paper to the filled piece, cut the edges to maintain continuity, and wrap the old plot around the back, using a couple of pieces of cardboard as a clipboard of sorts.

Within a year or so, I had created a monstrously long string of chart pages that zigzagged in size as I cut the edges to keep a single continuous chart. My original point-and-figure chart of silver and gold stretches out over 10 feet in length, containing thousands of X’s and O’s, and years of price action.

Often, after my day on the trading floor, I went uptown to the New York Public Library, and researched past daily price changes by accessing microfilm of the Wall Street Journal. That seems archaic, but the experience was invaluable because I dissected thousands of days’ worth of price series, covering dozens of markets.

From this handwritten data, I then created more point-and-figure charts, mostly for currencies, that I then began keeping in real time, while I was working in the gold and silver pits. It was this experience that inspired my interest in the foreign exchange and the (then new) overseas fixed-income markets.

There is nothing like ...