#000643
Technical Analysis of Stock Trends, Seventh Edition
Robert D. Edwards and John Magee
The book technical analysts call their bible. First published in 1948, Robert D. Edwards and John Magee's *Technical Analysis of Stock Trends* set out a systematic method for reading price charts — trendlines, support and resistance, head-and-shoulders and other formations, volume, and the tenets of Dow Theory — on the premise that the collective behavior of investors leaves recognizable, tradable patterns. Magee is often called the father of technical analysis, and this volume codified the vocabulary the field still uses. This seventh edition continues the long line of revisions (later ones updated by W.H.C. Bassetti) that have kept the classic in print for three quarters of a century. Comprehensive and methodical, it is a working manual rather than light reading. Traders, market historians, and anyone curious about the roots of charting will find the foundational text here.
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The authors
Robert D. Edwards and John Magee were American market analysts who, working from Springfield, Massachusetts, in the 1940s, synthesized earlier chart-reading ideas — including Richard Schabacker's and Charles Dow's — into a single systematic treatment. Magee is widely credited as a founding figure of modern technical analysis.
The book
First issued in 1948, Technical Analysis of Stock Trends catalogs chart patterns and trend-following rules for timing entries and exits. Successive editions have expanded and modernized it while keeping the original framework intact; this is the seventh.
How it has aged
As a historical and practical foundation it is unmatched, and its pattern vocabulary is still universal among chartists. But its central claim is genuinely contested: academic finance, from the efficient-market hypothesis onward, has long questioned whether chart patterns reliably predict returns, and empirical support for many techniques is mixed. Read it as the discipline's cornerstone, not as settled science.
For more context
Set it against Burton Malkiel's A Random Walk Down Wall Street for the skeptical counterargument.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Robert D. Edwards and John Magee
- Publisher
- AMACOM
- Place of publication
- New York
- Year
- 1997
- Edition
- Seventh Edition
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Reference
- Location
- Colorado