A Short Course in Technical Trading

Rating:
Summary: It's a start!
Review: In no way is Technical Analysis a easy subject to tackle. It's full of intricacies, formulas, and complexities that most people have a hard time getting a full grasp of what they are trying to accomplish with technical analysis.

Mr. Kaufman does an excellent job of bringing this subject to the reader in a digestible form. As the author of three financial books I can attest to the difficulty of separating the art from the science of technical analysis. In "Futures For Small Speculators" I only bring it up briefly. In this respect Mr. Kaufman shines and exceeds my communication abilities.

This is a great start into the world of Technical Analysis without having to be overwhelmed by mathematics.

I definitely recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: Good for a short course, but a short course only
Review: TA is a highly sophisticated topic which cannot be covered thoroughly with a 316 page book. That's for sure. In fact, the author had been honest not to over promise with the humble title of his book. The scope of discussion is limited to chart patterns, trendlines, channels, moving averages, Fibonnaci numbers, MACD, Stochastics, RSI and a few others. As the author had emphasized his objective to make his book only an introduction to TA, I am not going to comment on the variety of TA tools covered. However, I still want to criticize on some of the weaknesses:
1) Number of real life examples/price charts are few.
2) The choice of parameters for MACD and Stochastics had not been discussed
3) False breakouts are so frequent in the author's graphs samples (that's a fact of life, I admit). However, the author made little attempt to teach readers how to avoid such traps with the use of multiple TA tools.
4) The relative weak Q&A sections that questions are focused on readers' understanding of the definition of jargons instead of the usage of TA tools.

Though the price is affordable, I am hesitant to recommend it to any aspiring trader/investor who are serious to get an elementary but quality course on TA. It's not the cost of the book that matters, but the cost of time and potential trading loss for reading it.