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The Definitive Guide to Point and Figure: A Comprehensive Guide to the Theory and Practical Use of the Point and Figure Charting Method
by Jeremy du Plessis

Point and Figure charts are one of the great secrets of the Technical Analysis world. Highly sophisticated and with a thoroughbred pedigree, they can, however, be overlooked by traders today.

Jeremy du Plessis - one of the foremost Point and Figure experts in the world - returns with a fully updated second edition of this definitive guide in an effort to redress this imbalance. This second edition, with an extensive revision to the text and introduction of brand new techniques, demystifies the world of Point and Figure charting. It includes a detailed explanation of the history and development of the technique from its invention to the modern day, and covers the makeup of the chart patterns, why they are created, and how to interpret them.

Throughout, readers are encouraged to understand Point and Figure charts from first principles, rather than just remember the names of a series of patterns. It is the first major work for 50 years to discuss in depth the original 1-box reversal method of Point and Figure charting and contrast it with the more popular 3-box reversal method.

Further, the explanation of how to use Point and Figure charts to project targets and calculate risk-reward ratios is the most comprehensive ever seen. Also featured in the second edition are:

• A step-by-step analysis of the FTSE 100 Index using the 3-box method, as well as the NASDAQ Composite Index, using the 1-box method
• A detailed discussion of optimising techniques
• An in-depth chapter on Analysing Point and Figure charts, extensively rewritten from the first edition
• A new explanation of how Point and Figure parameters are chosen and the implications of choosing them
• Two new Point and Figure construction methods never seen before
• Point and Figure's contribution to market breadth, with a look at bullish percent and two brand new indicators
• Full discussion of Point and Figure gaps and how they provide valuable information about the chart
• Lesser known, more advanced techniques such as the use of moving averages, parabolic SAR and Bollinger Bands on Point and Figure charts
• Price and volume activity histograms and how they provide information about support and resistance

All this is illustrated with numerous colour charts and observations from years of trading experience. According to du Plessis, Point and Figure charts are the 'voice of the market'. This book helps you listen to, and understand, that voice. Part of the Market Technicians Association (MTA) Required Reading list.

Bubble Value At Risk : Extremistan And Procyclicality



This is a story of the illusion of risk measurement. Financial risk management is in a state of confusion. The 2008 credit crisis has wreaked havoc on the Basel pillars of supervision by highlighting all the cracks in the current regulatory framework that had allowed the credit crisis to fester, and ultimately leading to the greatest crisis since the Great Depression. Policy responses were swift--UK's Financial Services Authority (FSA) published the Turner Review which calls for a revamp of many aspects of banking regulation, the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) speedily passed a Revision to its Basel II, while the Obama administration calls for a reregulation of the financial industry reversing the Greenspan legacy of deregulation. The value-at-risk risk measure, VaR, a central ideology for risk management, was found to be wholly inadequate during the crisis. Critically, this "riskometer" is used as the basis for regulatory capital--the safety buffer money set aside by banks to protect against financial calamities. The foundation of risk measurement is now questionable.

The first half of this book develops the VaR riskometer with emphasis on its traditionally-known weaknesses, and talks about current advances in risk research. The underlying theme throughout the book is that VaR is a faulty device during turbulent times and by its mathematical sophistication misled risk controllers into an illusion of safety. The author traces the fundamental flaw of VaR to its statistical assumptions--of normality, i.i.d. and stationarity--the "gang of three". These primitive assumptions are very pervasive in the frequentist statistics philosophy where probability is viewed as an objective notion and can be measured by sampling. A different school of thought, the Bayesians, argues for subjective probability and has developed an entire mathematical framework to incorporate the observer's opinion into the measurement (but this is a subject matter for another publication). We argue that the frequentist's strict mathematical sense often acts as a blinder that restricts the way we view and model the real world. In particular, two "newly" uncovered market phenomena-- extremistan and procyclicality--cannot be engaged using the frequentist mindset. There were already a few other well-known "market anomalies" that tripped the VaR riskometer during the 2008 crisis. All these will be detailed later.

In Part IV of the book, the author proposes a new risk metric called bubble VaR (buVaR) which does not invoke any of the said assumptions. BuVaR is not really a precise measurement of risk; in fact it presumes that extreme loss events are unknowable (extremistan) and moves on to the more pressing problem--how do we build an effective buffer for regulatory capital that is countercyclical, and that safeguards against extreme events. This book is an appeal (as is this preface) to the reader to consider a new paradigm of viewing risk--that one need not measure risk (with precision) to protect against it. By being obsessively focused on measuring risk, the risk controller may be fooled by the many pitfalls of statistics and randomness. This could lead to a false sense of security and control over events which are highly unpredictable. It is ultimately a call for good judgment and pragmatism. This book is intended to reach out to the top management of banks (CEOs and CROs), to regulators, to policy makers and to risk practitioners--not all of whom may be as quantitatively inclined as the specialized risk professional. But they are the very influencers of the coming financial reregulation drama. We are living in epic times and ideas help shape the world for the better (or for worst). It is hoped that the ideas in this book can open up new and constructive research into countercyclical measures of risk.

Trading for a Living: Psychology, Trading Tactics, Money Management
by Alexander Elder

Trading for a Living Successful trading is based on three M's: Mind, Method, and Money. Trading for a Living helps you master all of those three areas:

• How to become a cool, calm, and collected trader
• How to profit from reading the behavior of the market crowd
• How to use a computer to find good trades
• How to develop a powerful trading system
• How to find the trades with the best odds of success
• How to find entry and exit points, set stops, and take profits

Trading for a Living helps you discipline your Mind, shows you the Methods for trading the markets, and shows you how to manage Money in your trading accounts so that no string of losses can kick you out of the game. To help you profit even more from the ideas in Trading for a Living, look for the companion volume--Study Guide for Trading for a Living. It asks over 200 multiple-choice questions, with answers and 11 rating scales for sharpening your trading skills. For example: Question Markets rise when

• there are more buyers than sellers
• buyers are more aggressive than sellers
• sellers are afraid and demand a premium
• more shares or contracts are bought than sold

Every change in price reflects what happens in the battle between bulls and bears. Markets rise when bulls feel more strongly than bears. They rally when buyers are confident and sellers demand a premium for participating in the game that is going against them. There is a buyer and a seller behind every transaction. The number of stocks or futures bought and sold is equal by definition.

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Interview with Dr. Alexander Elder: "I want to be a psychiatrist in the market"

MQL5 Cookbook: Developing a Framework for a Trading System Based on the Triple Screen Strategy

9 Weekend Reads

• A Bearish Technical Case for Precious Metals (Brandt)
• Shale Is Not a Ponzi (FT Alphaville, Part II)
• Millennials Aren’t Changing Jobs as Much. That’s a Big Problem for the Economy (Wonkblog) see also Why Hasn’t the Class of 2009 Grown up? (Vox)
• Is It Time to Refinance? Jumbo Fixed-Rate Mortgages Have Dipped to a Year-to-Date Low (WSJ)
• uh-oh: China’s State Media Join Brokerages Saying Buy Equities (Bloomberg) see also Goldman Sachs on Why Stock Pickers Have Suffered a Really Bad Year (MoneyBeat)
• A Land Where High Fees Reign Supreme (Morningstar)
• Why Walking Helps Us Think (New Yorker)
• Not Safe For Not Working On (Dan Kaminsky) see also Apps You Need to Deauthenticate Before Selling Your Devices (Lifehacker.com)
• New Species of Dinosaur Weighed as Much as a Dozen Elephants (WSJ)

1. Microsoft announced plans to buy Minecraft, a building game that's basically the digital version of Legos, for $2.5 billion.
2. Here's why Microsoft bought Minecraft: It's a good business deal, Microsoft is committed to gaming, and Minecraft is more than a game, it's almost a social network.
3. Here's a big profile of Tony Fadell, founder/CEO of Nest, which is now a Google company.
4. If you want to understand Alibaba, which is about to have the biggest IPO in history, then you have to read this.
5. Here are the biggest advertisers on Google. Amazon is number one.
6. We went to the Uber driver protests here in New York City.
7. Charlie Rose ran part 2 of the Tim Cook interview, and in it Cook says your data is safer with Apple than anyone else.
8. Apple created a webpage so you can delete the U2 album it's giving you for free.
9. eBay's PayPal is running attack ads against Apple, saying "we want our money safer than our selfies."
10. People are developing self-healing roads that could change our infrastructure forever.

• Shrinking Bond Desks Taken by Journeymen as Masters Fade (Bloomberg)
• The Alibaba IPO Research (Nanex)
• Low Oil Prices: Sign of a Debt Bubble Collapse, Leading to the End of Oil Supply? (Our Finite World)
• The Country That’s Supposed to Be Holding Europe Together Is Actually Dragging It Down (Ozymandias)
• This Man’s Job: Make Bill Gates Richer (WSJ)
• Americans Are OK With Big Business. It’s Business Lobbying Power They Hate. (Upshot)
• Climate Change Will Be Solved in Cities -- Or Not at All (Scientific American) see also Profit From Global Warming, Even if You Don’t Believe In It (Daily Reckoning)
• The Political-Messaging Huckster Behind Roger Goodell’s Awful Presser (Deadspin)
• Don’t Blame Uber (stratechery)
• Remind me again: Just Why Does the NFL Have Tax-Exempt Status? (Reuters)

Open Secret: The Global Banking Conspiracy That Swindled Investors Out of Billions is the new book written by Erin Arvedlund.

The book goes behind the scenes of the elite firms that trafficked in LiBOR based products, including Barclays Capital, UBS, Rabobank, and Citigroup to show the negative impact they had on both ordinary investors and borrowers.
Erin’s claim to fame was a column she wrote in Barron’s in the early 2000s outing Bernie Madoff as a fraud. It was a national bestseller titled Too Good to Be True.

• Inflation Data in the U.S. Is Built Around a Survey that People Increasingly Won’t Take (Real Time Economics)
• Why Oil is Crashing (BI) see also OPEC oil output hits highest since 2012 on Libya, Saudi (Reuters)
• 7 reasons Comcast is the most hated company in America (Daily Dot)
• Americans Have No Idea How Bad Inequality Really Is… And if they did, they wouldn’t want European-style solutions. (Slate)
• Hong Kong’s protests are putting Chinese web censorship to the test (The Verge)
• FDIC’s Hoenig Keeps Wall Street on Edge (WSJ)
• Tools to detect bullshit (Balloon Juice) see also Methods: Falsification tests (Incidental Economist)
• How to Do the Best Work of Your Life (LinkedIn)
• In conservative media, Obamacare is a disaster. In the real world, it’s atually working. (Vox) see also Studies Show Everything the Right Believes about Minimum Wage, Taxes, Global Warming, Healthcare is Wrong (Rolling Stone)
• Antarctica Has Lost Enough Ice to Cause a Measurable Shift in Gravity (Wired)

10 Weekend Reads

Pour yourself a tall cup of coffee, and settle in for our longer form reads:

• The Astonishing Story of the Federal Reserve on 9-11 (Daily Kos)
• The Self-Made Man: The Story of America’s Most Pliable, Pernicious, Irrepressible Myth (Slate)
• Revisiting the Lehman Brothers Bailout That Never Was (NYT)
• Zero Percent Water (Medium)
• Exodus: Elon Musk argues that we must put a million people on Mars if we are to ensure that humanity has a future (Aeon) see also Larry Ellison Bought an Island in Hawaii. Now What? (NYT)
• There is much to learn from the paper towel: Making products as simple as possible (Medium)
• The NSA and Me (The Intercept)
• Why is Thomas Piketty’s 700-page book a bestseller? Capital in the Twenty-First Century has swept American discourse. Four experts – Brad DeLong, Tyler Cowen, Stephanie Kelton and Emanuel Derman – take on why that is (The Guardian)
• The Internet Is Broken, and Shellshock Is Just the Start of Our Woes (Wired)
• It’s silly to be frightened of being dead. The process of dying is another matter (The Guardian)

Whats up for the rest of the weekend?

Crazy Is a Compliment: The Power of Zigging When Everyone Else Zags
by Linda Rottenberg

"If people aren't calling you crazy, you aren't thinking big enough."

These days taking chances isn’t just for college dropouts in hoodies. Whether you work at a Fortune 500 company, a nonprofit, or a mom-and-pop, everybody needs to think and act like an entrepreneur. We all need to be nimble, adaptive, daring—and maybe even a little crazy—or risk being left behind.

But how do you take smart risks without risking it all? That’s Linda Rottenberg’s expertise. As the cofounder and CEO of Endeavor, the world’s leading organization dedicated to supporting fast-growing entrepreneurs, she’s spent the last two decades helping innovators think bold and execute smart.

Now Rottenberg draws on her unrivaled experience to show you the proven techniques to achieve your dreams: from overcoming fear to facing down critics, from stalking supporters to exploiting chaos. Crazy Is a Compliment combines inspiring stories, original research, and practical advice to create a road map for getting started and going bigger.

Rottenberg brings to life iconic entrepreneurs like Walt Disney and Estée Lauder and reveals how companies like MTV, GE, and Burberry found their best successes by breaking the corporate mold and embracing the entrepreneur mind-set. She also introduces us to some of the one thousand entrepreneurs she’s advised, like Leila Velez, who started a hair-care company in her kitchen sink in Rio that now earns $80 million a year. As Linda writes:

Every day I meet people with a dream. Maybe you’re serving coffee and fantasizing about launching a microbrewery; maybe you’ve skipped college and yearn to start your own design firm; maybe you’re sitting in your cubicle and brainstorming a new idea that can improve your company.