Kase on Technical Analysis Workbook: Trading and Forecasting

Foreword

I met Cynthia more than 20 years ago when we were touring for Dow Jones-Telerate. We talked about the markets. She was full of contagious energy, very excited about trading and technical analysis, and had just developed her DevStop and started her new business. She still is just as enthusiastic. Since then she has developed a significant following in the energy markets, an ever-changing, volatile, and seemingly unpredictable commodity. Yet she has flourished where many have failed. I can only attribute that to her discipline and understanding of risk, two characteristics that I rank exceptionally high for those expecting to profit from trading.

There seems to be a tendency among the senior industry professionals to give back at some point. That is, there is great personal satisfaction to share what you've learned with the next generation of traders. There may be some personal gain, but the overwhelming balance is the satisfaction. It is also a two-way process. When you teach, you learn from your students. It could simply be the questions they ask, which lead you to more clarity, but also the ideas embedded in the questions that lead you further on the path to discovery. It's the process of talking with people, rather than to people, and valuing what everyone says.

Cynthia is one of those professionals who have learned and now shares. Her course is targeted to take the novice through the most practical elements of technical analysis, but also holds exceptional value for the advanced analyst. She covers the most popular and useful chart patterns, trends, and momentum indicators at the outset, but then develops considerable sophistication later on. She gives detailed explanations of her own indicators, risk controls, trading filters, multiple time frames, and puts them together into a trading program that can be personalized.

For someone interested in developing their own special trading program, new concepts are vital. They stimulate your thought process and distinguish your trading from others'. Cynthia's course is filled with her own unique approach to many aspects of trading and her own interpretation of well-known methods. At the simplest level she advocates a double true range, that is, a range formed by two days of price movement rather than the standard 1-day range because it is more stable. I agree. It is a simple but important variation on volatility measurement.

As she gets into the description of various oscillators, her KSDI (a divergence indicator) is shown to be much clearer and more reliable than the standard RSI, stochastic, or MACD versions. We both like divergence because it's proved to be one of those reliable trading signals, but Cynthia's version is much better and less