Chapter one:

The Technical Approach to Trading and Investing

240 U. S. STEEL 220 X

200

180 160

140

120

100

80

60

40

20

1929 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946

FIGURE 1. Monthly price ranges of U.S. Steel common from January 1929 to December 1946. Compare the great swings in the market price for this stock from 1929 (extreme high, 261) to 1932 (extreme low, 21), from 1932 to 1937, from 1937 to 1938, from 1942 to 1946 with its book values for those years as cited on the previous page.

but which are nevertheless all synthesized, weighed, and nally expressed in the one precise gure at which a buyer and a seller get together and make a deal (through their agents, their respective stock brokers). This is the only gure that counts. Moreover, the technician claims, with complete justication, that the bulk of the statistics which the fundamentalists study are past history, already out of date and sterile, because the market is not interested in the