Point and Figure Charting: The Essential Application for Forecasting and Tracking Market Prices, 4th Edition

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Point and Figure Charting: A Lost Art

I would never have thought we would be embarking on the fourth edition of this book when I wrote the first edition. I know now that this will not be the last edition either. Technology has significantly changed the way we approach technical analysis and the way we implement the art of portfolio management. The Internet has provided a delivery system we could not have imagined when I was a stockbroker at Merrill, Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith in the 1970s. What I mean by that statement is that computers can now do most of the work for you. We have taught the computer to do exactly what we used to do by hand 25 years ago. The operative word there is taught. The computer can only do what we tell it to do. Somewhere in the future it might do its own thinking, but at this writing, it has to be told. Think about medical technology for a second. I have a friend who is going to be operated on next week by a robot. To me this is The Jetsons revisited. The Jetsons was an animated sitcom that debuted in 1962. It was about a Space Age family living in the future (the exact opposite of the animated sitcom The Flintstones, which was a family living in the Stone Age). Much of what was depicted in that weekly show has come to pass. Think of how automobiles can now parallel park by themselves. Robots can perform operations on humans but ...