Technical Analysis For Dummies, 4th Edition

Introduction

Timing can be 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 — and taking it out with a gain — 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. And they’re still standing after a market crash, unlike many so-called value investors. 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 expanding at an exponential pace. A few years ago, an Internet search for the term “technical analysis” returned 206 million responses. Now it returns 1.36 billion responses. Even after weeding out duplicates and mismatches, it’s still a huge amount of material. Don’t be intimidated by the sheer size of the available material. In this fourth edition of Technical Analysis For Dummies, I cover the core concepts, most of which you could apply today with no further research. If you were to explore the most advanced entry in the 1.36 billion entries, most of it would be familiar to you from reading this book.

Technical ideas range from the super simple to the tremendously complex. I cover the core concepts that are the building blocks of all, or nearly all, of those tremendously complex systems. It’s up to you to choose to stay ...