correction getting much closer now., page-125

CW

No offence taken!

we do actually agree in part!

for the record, in David's book, he said he was broke in 1986, apparently some kind of failed business. he could see the market was coming to a top, and the report I read, it states he was indeed holding a lot of short positions in october 1987, and on 'the day' it crashed cleaned up and made 3 million. so yeah ... he actually did do what you suggested and made a killing from his prediction. And I can tell you now, he done that over and over. (as did gann)

Its by no means a crystal ball, no one purports to 'look into the future' but there are mathematical and charting methods which can be used to forecast movements and prices in time with extraordinary accuracy. David actually teaches people to trade with the trend, and while he certainly has the ability to pick major tops and bottoms strongly recommends trading with the trend - as he points out himself, there is totally no point in knowing major tops and bottoms if you cannot make money in between. he's talking as someone who makes money trading for a living.

incidentally, he also purports an idea, which I'd never thought of till i heard it. The idea that, while fundamental analysis is important (i'm actually much better at F/A than T/A), he purports the theory that, fundamental analysis is not as important as TA, reason being, an SP will react to all kinds of factors, F/A being one of them, this will show up in the price and the chart. a company with good fundamentals will end up with an uptrending chart anyway. the general consensus is, if you find a chart which is trending up, there is a very high chance that if you then look at the fundamentals, they will be good. I.E. the chart tells the story anyway. The market is quite a good analyst and it will tell you instantly by looking at the chart what it thinks of the company.

how often have you seen a solid support line broken, and then that day or a few days later, or a few weeks later, the company comes out with some bad news?

Having said all of that, i certainly do not agree with the view that fundamental analysis is not worth learning, to the contrary, but i do agree that, a chart will give you a good indication of the fundamental health of the company.