Technical Analysis For Dummies, 3rd Edition

Introduction

Timing is everything.

Timing is critical in cooking, romance, music, politics, farming, and a hundred other aspects of life on this planet. Putting money into a securities market is no different — you need good timing to get the best results.

Technical traders all over the world, amateur and professional alike, earn a living using technical analysis to time their trades in many different markets. They not only earn a living, but are also still standing after a market crash. In this book, I try to explain how they do that and how you can do it, too.

About This Book

The technical analysis industry is positively blooming. Go to an Internet search engine and type in technical analysis, and you get 206 million responses, more than four times the number only two years ago. The phrase support and resistance results in over 74 million hits, five times the hits from only two years ago. Okay, everyone knows the limitations of Web searches, but even after weeding out the mismatches, that's still a huge amount of material. Don't be intimidated. In this book, I include core concepts, some of which you can apply today with no further research.

I want you to grasp the mindset of the technical trader or investor: To think independently, to take responsibility for actions, and most of all, to act on observation rather than conventional wisdom. Try to leave your preconceptions about trading and investing behind. For example, a core technical concept is that the technical trader cuts ...