Point and Figure Charting: The Essential Application for Forecasting and Tracking Market Prices (2007) by Thomas Dorsey

Summary: The original edition is the best book I have read in teaching a charting method clearly and scientifically. The revised edition has expanded to cover concepts outside of just point and figure charting. A lot of chart examples are given so that the readers can follow the text better in the revised edition. Personally, I prefer the original one because it is 100 pages shorter with great focus on the subject – applications of point and figure charting techniques. My statistics driven trading method is heavily influenced by this book. Essential reading for all traders.

Review

The original edition of this book was printed back in 1995. It was a short concise book teaching the point and figure charting technique with statistics backing. As far as I can recall, that was the only book at the time paying attention to the statistical behaviours of chart patterns. It also documented several unique methods in using point and figure charts like reading market breadth, charting with percentage driven method and finding stockpicks based on relative strengths among the stocks.

Rules of engagement are clearly defined and the chart patterns are clean and simple. For those readers who have not been exposed to charting styles that are not time based, it is an eye opener showing that price based only patterns can be hiding in your time based chart all along while in point and figure charts the pattern would be spotted easily.

The revised edition was made available since 2001 and is an expansion of the original book. More chart examples are provided with updated content relating to modern technologies like Internet.

As a summary, the uniqueness of the content in this book makes it one of the must read charting textbook of all time.

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