Hi Dave
good on you.
There are heaps of modern materials which align with modern charting software . I am sure they are great but if you like to dig deeper then you may find
The Book "Fibonacci and Gann Applications in Financial Markets" by MacLean interesting. It struck a chord with me anyway and points out the problems with retail using vanilla software charting. I dont think you need to read it but up to you. i just find a lot of charts don't communicate the real story. The CFDs and trading houses advocate stops and seem to have a clearout every so often of the stops so all the funds end up with them. pure evil in my eye anyway.
The usual charting books include the VSA method in the book "The Undeclared Secrets That Drive the Stock Market"? by T Williams
also there are lots out there on the world of speed angles, swing-high swing -low spikes, darvis breaks and fib levels.......
but i expect you are on top of them anyway.
i find the breaks on the daily then weekly and finally the monthly charts have worked well post gfc which combined with fib levels and the hammer helped provide a framework and a great background for the speed angles. now we are in the mopping up where it is a new background.
i find the midcaps are the best ones for following the fib levels almost to the cent.
WHC and midcaps
you and I posted on this run of WHC. it has now doubled, retraced and almost doubled again. the way it tackles each level will help decide whether to buy more. hold or sell.
@gypaetus i think is also onto it as well. what is wrong with a method that works and doubles your money. i posted on the first move of whc from the break up from 60c to $5. each step until i realised i was alone. it is good to have some company in the midcaps
retail seems to only like the micros which are often a killing ground for them. so I hope you can improve yourself and become one of the 10% who can win in the commods market. sounds brutal but too true.
you dont need to go this far but i did a 2 year uni course (part time) on finance. I found the finance stuff fascinating. The crunching of numbers. opex capex ebita balance sheets and the real story which i found dead useful before the last run of the goldies on which weightings to give to each. i was wrong on some like slr but right more often than wrong. it is all learning.
i also did an afternoon course with an experienced financial accountant who has advised corporations for years and he made a lot of sense on a lot of things financial not just for markets but for life. I would recommend at least a finance seminar.
I also have friends with funds who help with the background picture. it is now almost wholesale where a business runs the funds but how the buys and sell are funnelled through a larger wholesaler.
then we have the real life experiences and what i call the Corporate Chart - there is very little out there I have found that covers it. cap raises, soph investors, lunches with investors all combine with the quarterlies and working out best times to buy, hold and sell. then we have the macros, the $US, the Fed and there is the practical experience of working with corporations and funds and gant charts for their projects and their internal workings
It all helps with perspective.
I found the works on Gann interesting but frustrating as it is so inexact but his work on cycles make sense and provide a useful perspective and is most closly alligned to my style in the post GFC recovering world
it is a new world now. gfc is history. we have the US Fed and QE
i also include good brokers in what i call the corporate chart. they normally know when something is going to run. the cap raising managers will raise a stock price artificially then have a cap raise and then the news flow starts. so a good broker is a useful contact. we did have someone on here who was very good at picking the next micro to run. i suspect he was a broker. he was quite clear he steered clear of all charts and he was damn useful except when things were at a high. his mantra of buy more blindly doesn't always work.
Experience - if you have a chance to see what goes on with these corporations it will create some new perceptions. there is a lot in the news you can read. i always liked the story of joe kennedy making money on the market in the 1920s with his own politely called system. then he was put in charge of the governance of wall street to stop wall st doing what he had done successfully for years. they called it putting the fox in charge of the hen house. then in modern times i sat in with a fund which had lost half a billion in th gfc. there was no public outcry. they were a respectable business. the public never heard of the loss. whenever you put your money into a stock you just do not know what is happening or going to happen. it is all what i call life experience.
i am sure you have your own experiences and contacts.
there are a lot on this thread all with different methods and i enjoy it and find it useful. what worked post gfc is ending. we are in a new world. i hope we end up in a supercycle over the next 10 years but we will see.