Book Summary
Published in 1999, Getting Started in Technical Analysis is Jack D. Schwager’s plain-English introduction to chart reading — the book he wrote for investors who had heard about technical analysis but had never been shown how it actually works. Schwager is best known for the Market Wizards interviews, and he brings the same interviewer’s clarity here: no jargon for its own sake, no promise of easy money, just the tools, explained one at a time, with examples drawn from real markets.
The book works through the core toolkit in order. It starts with the basic building blocks — bar charts, trendlines, support and resistance — then moves on to chart patterns, the ones traders actually watch for, such as head and shoulders, triangles, and double tops and bottoms. From there it covers the major technical indicators: moving averages, oscillators, momentum measures, and volume, explaining what each one is designed to capture and, just as importantly, what it cannot do. A final section pulls the pieces together into a trading plan, including position sizing and risk control.
What sets the book apart is its restraint. Schwager is a practitioner writing for beginners, and he is careful to say where the evidence is thin. He presents technical analysis as a way of organizing information about price — a discipline for deciding when to buy, when to sell, and when to stay out — rather than as a crystal ball. The book never claims charts predict the future; it claims they help you manage the present, and it is honest about the difference.
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Who is Jack D. Schwager?
Jack D. Schwager is a trader, author, and researcher who has spent his career studying how successful traders actually work. His Market Wizards series, starting with the original 1989 interviews, is the closest thing the trading world has to an oral history: long, candid conversations with traders who made and kept fortunes, focused on how they think rather than on what they trade. The series made him one of the best-known writers on trading, and it is still the first recommendation most professionals give to newcomers.
Schwager has also written extensively on futures and technical analysis, including the multi-volume Schwager on Futures series and A Complete Guide to the Futures Market, and he co-founded FundSeeder, a platform that finds and funds undiscovered trading talent. His work has a consistent theme: the edge in trading comes from process and discipline, not from a secret indicator. Getting Started in Technical Analysis is the entry point to that work — the book he wrote for readers who want to understand the charts before they risk money on them.
Lessons From Getting Started in Technical Analysis
Price is information, not prophecy. The book’s first and most important lesson is what a chart is: a record of what buyers and sellers actually did, not a forecast of what they will do. A trendline tells you where demand has shown up before; a breakout tells you something changed. Treating those signals as probabilities rather than predictions is the difference between using technical analysis and being used by it — and it is the habit that separates Schwager’s approach from the fortune-telling version of chart reading.
Trend is the only free lunch in the toolkit. Most of the book’s practical advice comes down to identifying the direction of the market and not fighting it. Moving averages, trendlines, and support and resistance are all ways of answering the same question — which way is this market going? — and Schwager shows how to combine them so that one indicator confirms another instead of each one shouting over the rest. The lesson for investors is broader than trading: in any market, the trend is the context, and positions taken against it need a much better reason.
Indicators measure different things, so use them for different jobs. A momentum oscillator and a moving average are not two versions of the same tool; one measures how fast price is moving, the other measures where it has been. Schwager’s walkthrough of each indicator — what it captures, where it lags, where it gives false signals — is the most useful part of the book, because it teaches readers to stop looking for one magic indicator and start assembling a small set that answers different questions.
Risk control is the real subject. The final section, on building a trading plan, is where the book earns its keep. Position sizing, stop placement, and knowing when a setup has failed matter more than any pattern, because a trader who survives a bad stretch gets to trade the next one. Schwager’s insistence that the plan comes before the trade — and that the plan includes an exit — is the lesson that carries over to investing generally: decide in advance what would make you sell, and write it down before you buy.
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Criticisms of the Book
The main weakness of Getting Started in Technical Analysis is its age. Published in 1999, it describes a market of floor traders, daily newspapers, and end-of-day charts, and some of its examples and its discussion of data feel dated in an era of algorithmic trading and real-time everything. The core ideas — trend, support and resistance, risk control — have not changed, but a reader who wants the modern plumbing of markets will need a newer book. Schwager himself has said as much about the field in his later work.
The book is also, by design, a starting point. It explains each tool but does not go deep on any of them, and it does not seriously engage with the academic criticism of technical analysis — the evidence that many chart patterns do not beat a simple buy-and-hold after costs. Readers who want that debate should pair it with a skeptical treatment such as A Random Walk Down Wall Street; this book teaches the craft, not the case against it.
Who is This Book For?
This is the book for an investor who keeps hearing about charts and wants to know what the fuss is about. It pairs naturally with Market Wizards, the interviews that made Schwager famous, and with The Little Book of Market Wizards and Hedge Fund Market Wizards, which show how the tools in this book are used by traders who survived the markets for decades. Readers who enjoyed those books will find this one the missing manual — the explanation of the techniques the wizards were describing.
It is less useful for readers who already trade technically. If you can already read a chart and know what an RSI is, much of the book will feel elementary, and you would get more from Schwager’s deeper work or from %s. It is also not a book about investing in the buy-and-hold sense: it is about timing entries and exits, and readers who want a long-term portfolio strategy should look elsewhere.
Final Thoughts
Getting Started in Technical Analysis has lasted because it respects both the subject and the reader. It never oversells what charts can do, it never hides behind jargon, and it treats risk control as the point of the exercise rather than an afterthought. For a beginner, that honesty is more valuable than any pattern in the book.
Read it before you put money behind a chart-based idea, and read it again after your first losing trade — the second time through, the section on trading plans reads less like theory and more like advice you wish you had followed. As an introduction to technical analysis, it remains one of the clearest places to start.
