foreign exchange

Many of the technical analysis books only show you the patterns, they don't go deep enough into what you should do when you see those patterns. This book tells you what you should do and gives you case studies. If you want to build a system for trading stocks, this book should be in your library.

This book is a tremendous gift to future generations and should be the basis of a mandatory course for everyone in highschool. If it were already, many of my friends and acquaintances would not have lost their fortunes in the last 3 years' bear market.
There is a mountain of great advice and detailed checklists for buying, selling and shorting stocks. Some of my favourite quotes are as follows:

-"The mutual fund industry constantly trumpets from the rooftops the merits for the long term...However the benefits...diminish significantly when capital is constantly eroded by transaction costs and withdrawals to pay capital gains tax...Dickens observed that 'the business of lawyers is making business for lawyers.' Things do not change. The investment business is not immune to mutual back-scratching at the expense of the public...There is no doubt that the rapid turnover of stocks is one reason why so few funds come close even to equaling the performance of the stock indexes."

-"Never put a large amount of money into stocks all at once."

-"Buy bonds for retirement when you are retired."

-"It is as important to know when to sell a stock, or when to sell it short, as when to buy it."

-"It is an absolute certainty that in the future there will be stock market declines similar to the one in 1987. Some will be more severe and some will last much longer." [Alexander's book was published in 1999 before the major bear market of 2000 -...]

-"During a general bear market put [ALL] your money into cash equivalents like Treasury Bills until the storm blows over...Contrary to popular belief, for all practical purposes there are no stocks to own when the general direction of the market is down."

-"There is certain to be a sell signal for every stock you ever own...Warren Buffett...has shown that the stated policy of the mutual fund industry ['buy and hold'] does in fact work...in a bull market"!

"The market is always right; you either make money or you lose it!"

-"It often happens that the stock that doubles once goes on to double again...the greatest stocks always look expensive."

-"Buy strength, not weakness!"

-"Do not buy many different stocks...Aimless diversification merely increases the liklihood of investing in fewer great stocks."

-"Always place an initial protective stop as soon as you buy a stock."

-"A Lindahl price rule and a double reversal price rule are particularly powerful indicators of the potential for a stock to make a substantial move."

-"You should never own a stock making a new 52 week low but you might well consider selling it short."

-"In a general bear market you should generally do nothing but sell short, if you are in the market at all."

-"The downside [in] writing options is [they are] a waste of time compared with owning stocks like Microsoft and Intel when stocks are really running."

The book has many more gems and concrete action plans. It is the most useful book for the public I have ever read. It should top Hillary Clinton's autobiography and Harry Potter, but, regrettably, it won't! People will continue to listen to their liars - their brokers, financial planners and mutual fund salespeople, regrettably. A few will read the book, and be wiser, and richer!

When I picked up this book, I expected something similar to the book All About Market Timing, which overall I thouht was a good book. However, I got something very different in this book. This book consists of an introduction to a handful of indicators, such as on balance volume, the macd, moving averages, stochastics, and some subjective price patterns.
The description of these indicators seems okay to me, although nothing special. He has a brief section on options, where he makes a lot of extremely dubious claims, including the often-repeated professionals sell options, amatuers buy them. I suppose if you repeat this lie often enough, somebody is bound to believe it. He goes on to describe what is apparently his preferred option strategy: covered calls. There's nothing wrong with covered calls or being long premium or any other option strategy, but to claim that one is correct and the others are wrong is quite questionable.

He also is fond of uncovered puts, as a viable option strategy -- unfortunately, this strategy does not work out over the long term; you make steady small profits until you encounter a 10+ sigma event in the market, and get blown out. The lessons of LTCM and Niederhoffer should not be forgotten, especially given that equities markets trend far more than one would assume based on a log normal distribution. High probability trades are not always good trades!

I'm trying to get a handle on the intended audience of this book. It seems to be intended for people new to a technical approach to the market, and if that's the case, I don't think it'd make it to my top 100 list of such books. If someone is new to technical approaches, i'd probably recommend the much smaller (and in my view, much more useful) The Visual Investor by John Murphy.

Overall, I think this book should be avoided like the plague. There's nothing new in this book, just rehashed age-old advice, some of which is dubious, some of which is good.