The two authors of "Technical Analysis of Stock Trends" which many call it "The Bible of Technical Analysis" are:
Robert D. Edwards John
John Magee
You may expect these two guys earn a lot of money from market since they wrote the Bible of TA? Let's see their outcome:
http://knowledgebase.mta.org/?fusea...esourceID=13D415EC-EE10-3BCF-3447AE4BADFB8263
Robert D. Edwards John: "This partnership lasted less than a decade before Edwards left in 1951 to become a high school science teacher in South Carolina."
Very likely Robert found out that kept writing "bible" would not help him make more money than being a high school teacher so he left John Magee and of course his teacher career had nothing to do with trading. Robert knew being a high school teacher had much better chance to make a living than writing more bible or using his knowledge in this bible to win(not lose) any money in market, his bid should be correct!
How about John?
http://www.investopedia.com/articles/financial-theory/10/pioneers-technical-analysis.asp
"Unfortunately for Magee, early on he was better at looking after his clients than his own portfolio, often selling out in his own portfolio based on gut feelings despite strong hold signals from his charts."
So he could not believe what he wrote when he invested. Base on what I read from articles, John kept writing more stuff about TA. Very likely he made a living by writing "interesting" TA stuff but nothing really from investment (especially from TA).
"Magee graduated from MIT in 1923 and worked in a variety of sales and marketing jobs, including a position as a Fuller Brush salesman, until he met Robert D. Edwards in 1942."
MIT sounds cool right? But what did John really do before he started to write Bible with Robert and then kept writing about TA? John was a salesman but nothing else! John had been a salesman for around 20 year before having an idea to write TA stuff included bible with Robert. John came up with a perfect marketing solution to help him makes money after having 20 years of marking experience!
So I went through one of the original version of this "bible". It is very thick around 500 pages, most are wording, really a lot of wording and no scientific proof at all, just some random graphs showing "it works in this graph, then it should work anytime anywhere". Even in any graph that they tried to prove it works, there are so many ways to look at the same graph and write any kind of trendlines, curve line or whatever on there. No figure or data to prove any "idea" in the "bible" has any prediction power.
I really cannot just believe a "bible" by a high school teacher and a "financial entertainment writer" would help me anything related to trading especially no scientific proof in the bible at all but just crazy many wordings with few graphs.
Honestly it is much worse than watching CNBC. At least I can get some facts from CNBC news.
A lot or most of the TA are originally come from this "bible". Can we believe TA at all? Is TA more useful than purely guessing? Careers of these two authors tell you the answer!