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I've just started a practice account trading Forex and I want to learn candlesticks. I hear Steve Nison is the reigning authority. He's got a bunch of books and I don't know where to start. Below is a list of the ones I'm considering. Can anyone tell me what book is the most complete/most useful? Should I read more than one?
Japanese Candlestick Charting Techniques, Second Edition (Nov 1, 2001)
Beyond Candlesticks: New Japanese Charting Techniques Revealed (Nov 10, 1994)
The Candlestick Course (May 23, 2003)
Strategies for Profiting With Japanese Candlestick Charts (Feb 2, 2011)
Many thanks,
Champ
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
Disclaimer/disclosure: I've seen only 3 of the 4 books you mention and am no great admirer of Nison's books - in other words, this isn't one of the replies you wanted, and I apologise in advance for that.
Personally, I don't recommend any of them. It seems to me that Nison's books are, collectively, the classic example of cherry-picking evidence to suit the author's own perspective, by presenting examples which appear to illustrate the validity of the principles - in other words, they're not really evidential of anything at all. The author's idea of "corroborative evidence" reminds me of the marketing department of a pharmaceutical company that commissions ten different clinical trials on a new drug and then submits to the appropriate licensing authorities the only one that apparently demonstrates a benefit for their product, conveniently burying the other nine examples.
I don't for a moment suggest that "everything he's teaching is wrong", of course: simply that the way the information is presented in his books predicates that the reader without as much expertise as the author to start with (and why would an expert be reading it in the first place?) has no effective way to distinguish in the books between fact and opinion - and there's certainly a lot of the latter, and not all of it shared by others, to put it mildly.
IMO there are far better sources on "candlestick-reading" than Mr. Nison.
There is plenty of free material on candlesticks. Here for example. This is all you need. I do not trade them but many think they offer no edge. Candles are a small subset of price patterns, things like inside day breakouts, three-day island reversals, consecutive winners, etc. Here is an example. IMO more OHLC traders use price patterns rather than candlesticks.
Thanks for the resource on candlesticks. I'll definitely read that before I buy a book (might not need to now!)
Thanks for the price pattern link, too. I didn't realize candles were a subset of anything. Looks like ive got a lot of reading to do if I want to have an understanding of the entire subject of price patterns. (... Not that I think I could effectively apply all the info, I just want to have a general understand of what's motivating others.)