Technical Analysis of Stock Trends

Book excerpt: 2011 Reprint of 1958 Fourth Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. In 1948 Robert D. Edwards and John Magee published "Technical Analysis of Stock Trends" which is widely considered to be one of the seminal works of the discipline. It is exclusively concerned with trend analysis and chart patterns and remains in use to the present. As is obvious, early technical analysis was almost exclusively the analysis of charts, because the processing power of computers was not available for statistical analysis. "Technical analysis" is a financial term used to denote a security analysis discipline for forecasting the direction of prices through the study of past market data, primarily price and volume. Behavioral economics and quantitative analysis incorporate technical analysis, which being an aspect of active management stands in contradiction to much of modern portfolio theory.