It's not so much a matter of reading but a matter of testing and observing what you read in order to validate it. It's also learning to improvise, adapt, and overcome the odds by fine tuning your trading indices. The best place to start is John Murphy's book "Technical Analysis of the Financial Markets". I learned a great deal from Larry Williams book "The Secret of Selecting Stocks for Immediate and Substantial Gains". Get a good charting service and do a lot of back testing with historical data to validate what you are learning. Take a serious look at OmniTrader software by Nirvana Systems. It's very good. Don't rely on any software to make buy and sell decisions for your but, OmniTrader does make the same decisions I would make a high percentage of the time. Anytime you see a situation where a price formation or trading signal does not work the way it's supposed to work, don't just write it off an exception to what you have learned. Find out why this case was different and what other indices you should/could have been watching that would have cast doubt and kept you from making a bad trade. Strive constantly to try to find ways to improve your trading by adding different indicators to what you are using and even inventing your own indicators, many of which will end up being better than those you were using. For instance, I never liked the RSI until I decided that using a base of 14 to compute it made no sense what so ever. So I changed the base number to 10.19 (half the lunar cycle in terms of actual trading days per year) and now it's one of my most reliable indicators. I also invented the 84 day moving average which has proven to the most reliable moving average for finding support and resistance levels. So, it's a lot more than just reading a book but, by no means is it rocker science either and anyone with a 12th grade education can do it. There are many other good books too. There are also many books that can be destructive and well as educational. For instance, I just bought a book titled High Probability Trading by Marcel Link. While there are some very good ideas in that book, I would have to say that it does more to discourage and cause a new trader to doubt than to actually help. If you buy that book, you would do well to just skip over the first 75 pages or so where he makes a great attempt to convince you that will lose money your first year at trading. I never did. So, while there are some good things he can teach you, do not buy into everything he is selling in that book. Whether you make money or lose money your first year or first five years is a choice and not a destiny. So, having a positive mental attitude when trading is extremely important. Good luck to you. Remember always, if you are not learning everything you can about this lifetime, you are not preparing adequately for the next one.
