Test it before you Trust it

Description

Charts tell stories. This book tests them.

Feeds, forums and group chats are full of chart patterns that “almost always” work, and courses that promise a lifestyle to go with them. Test It Before You Trust It starts from a simpler idea: before trusting a pattern with real money, test it.

The book teaches complete beginners to read a price chart, explains every common tool and what the evidence says about it, and then shows how to turn a pattern into a written rule and test it on past prices, after costs, before any money is at risk. No programming is needed.

What’s inside

• How a chart is made: where prices come from, how orders and the spread work, how to read candles, and what a trade really costs.
• Every common tool, with the evidence: trend and support and resistance, candlestick and chart patterns, moving averages, RSI and MACD, volume, VWAP, volume profile, ATR and Bollinger Bands. Each tool is sorted as artistic, arithmetic or hybrid, so the reader knows how much of it is judgment.
• From picture to plan: turning a pattern into a written rule, setting stops and position size so every loss is planned, and working out win rate, payoff and expectancy.
• Swing trading first: why it suits beginners (fewer decisions, smaller costs, and it fits around a job), with a daily routine and a monthly review.
• An honest test: one simple rule, tested on ten years of daily prices for Apple, Nvidia, Tesla, an S&P 500 fund and Rolls-Royce, after costs, including where simply buying and holding did far better. A year of intraday trades on Apple shows what changes when the timeframe shrinks.
• Edge or luck: why a few lucky trades can beat a real edge, and how many trades it takes to tell the two apart.
• Written for the US, UK and Europe: ISAs, Roth IRAs, stamp duty and trading hours.
• What gets sold to beginners: finfluencers, courses, leveraged and inverse ETFs, penny stocks and meme-stock squeezes.
• Tools to use: a pre-trade checklist and routine, a trade journal, a position-size worksheet and 22 tool reference cards, with free downloads, including two spreadsheets.

Who it is for

Complete beginners, and anyone who has followed a chart tip or bought a course and wants to know whether it holds up. It is not for readers looking for signals or a system to copy: the book has neither.

About the author

Sharmil Kumar Gurunaathan has traded for over ten years, actively since 2020, mainly US stocks and index futures.

Details

Published by OBOS Publishing. Paperback, 6 × 9 in, 340 pages, and ebook. Free downloads: obospublishing.com/technical-analysis-downloads.

No signals, no promises: just a way to test an idea before it costs real money.

Trading involves a substantial risk of loss. This book is for education only and is not financial advice. The stocks and funds named are examples, not recommendations.