Chart Patterns  |  SEP 2006

Trading The Forex Wave by Raghee Horner

Stocks & Commodities V. 24:9 (19-24): Trading The Forex Wave by Raghee Horner Chart patterns are powerful tools and it is important to identify them by finding their building blocks. Here’s how. Only after I embraced market cycles did I truly begin to understand what to do with all the lines and levels I had learned to draw on my charts. Early on, as I began teaching myself to trade in the late 1980s to early 1990s, there were few books available about technical analysis. I found myself gravitating toward price (instead of news) because my mother was a bit of a market timer (although not trained nor aware that she was indeed using market timing). CHARTS, CHARTS, CHARTS Price and price action made sense to me, and so I ventured into charting armed with my father’s old engineering graph paper, drawing my own charts based on the closing price I would get from my commodity futures broker. It was also during this time I went to college and discovered the books that ended up shaping my view of the markets. Books by chartists Richard Schabacker and Richard Wyckoff were like the light I was searching for in my quest to become a trader. What is interesting about those books was that they were written in the early 1900s but are still as true and applicable today as anything current on my bookshelf. The other pivotal moment in my trading was the introduction of market cycles to my chart analysis. My bread and butter trades are momentum trades. My definition of this is an entry style based on entering a market as it breaks out or breaks down from a sideways market. Sideways markets are cycles of congestion or consolidation.

by Raghee Horner