High-Probability Trade Setups: A Chartist's Guide to Real-Time Trading

Chapter 2

My Personal Trading Journey

You might be wondering what my own history with trading has to do with a book about trading setups. I have three purposes in describing my own experience with the world of trading:

1. Every trader has a story, and I think it's helpful to understand a particular trader's narrative to better grasp what they have to say about the markets.

2. My experiences with trading occurred during some of the most extraordinary times in financial history—the Internet boom, the dot-com crash, the housing bubble, and the Great Recession.

3. Through the years, a lot of people have asked me to tell the Prophet story (that is, the founding and growth of my finance-oriented Internet company). Since so many people around the world use ProphetCharts, I believe it may be interesting to some readers to read about the history of the business.

EARLIEST INTEREST IN THE MARKETS

As a boy, growing up in the suburbs of Louisiana in the late 1970s, I had no exposure to anything resembling a stock chart. My family didn't have the kind of money that would have made such a thing relevant in the household, and the malaise of the 1970s made stocks seem absolutely passé in the world. Oil and gold were where the money was at, and equities were dead as far as most people were concerned. Even the esteemed magazine BusinessWeek declared “The Death of Equities.”

I do have a couple of memories from those days however, which in retrospect do resonate with my later interest in trading. ...