Technical Analysis For Dummies, 3rd Edition

Appendix

Additional Resources

Don't let yourself be overwhelmed and intimidated by the masses of information and advice about technical analysis in books and on the internet. To be charitable, a lot of the information is incomplete and much of it has a bias toward a particular world-view that is wrong or crackpot.

Relax. You don't need all this stuff — you just need enough to get started, and getting started really means knowing what topics to type into the search box of your browser. I believe that just about every key word in technical analysis appears in this book. Don't neglect YouTube; many technical analysts post short lessons on techniques.

You are welcome to find one technical trick and just use it over and over again, like Toby Crabel's opening gap tactic (see Chapter 16). In fact, the Crabel technique is one of the ones available on YouTube. Plenty of technical traders use a single technique to achieve their financial goals. I know one trader who made his first million after reading a single book (Edwards and Magee — see the “Additional Reading” section later in the chapter). Others try all the ideas and methods, and don't want to miss a trick.

You should spend time and money on research because you never know when you may come across an idea that strikes a resounding chord in you — the Eureka! moment when you say to yourself: I can do this.

The Bare Minimum

You can use price quotes from the newspaper and graph paper, but realistically, you need charting software and ...