Technical analysis from A to Z

What this book actually teaches

Steven Achelis's Technical Analysis from A to Z is a reference encyclopedia of the technical indicators used by chart-based traders. Achelis founded Equis International, the company behind the MetaStock charting platform, and the book grew out of the platform's documentation — each indicator gets a short, standardized entry covering the calculation, the interpretation, the underlying intuition, and a sample chart. The first portion of the book is a primer on technical analysis as a discipline; the bulk is the A-to-Z reference itself.

The arguments and content stack in two parts. First, the introductory chapters lay out the philosophy of technical analysis — price discounts everything, prices move in trends, history repeats — and walk through the foundational concepts: support and resistance, trend lines, chart patterns (head-and-shoulders, double tops, triangles, flags), volume confirmation, and the basic Dow Theory framing. Second, the encyclopedia itself covers well over a hundred indicators across categories: moving averages, oscillators (RSI, stochastics, MACD), volume-based studies (on-balance volume, accumulation/distribution), volatility measures (Bollinger Bands, ATR), market-breadth indicators, and cycle and momentum tools. Each entry is short and practical: how it is calculated, what signal it generates, and where it tends to fail.

The natural audience is traders learning to read charts who want a single reference shelf they can flip to when they encounter an unfamiliar indicator, plus quantitative-leaning readers who want the formulas laid out compactly.

The weaknesses are honest ones. The book is descriptive, not evaluative — it explains what each indicator is supposed to do, but it does not weigh which indicators have held up under serious out-of-sample testing and which are overfit folklore. The academic finance literature is largely skeptical of most technical indicators as standalone strategies, and that critique is barely present here. The format also rewards skimming over understanding: readers can collect a long list of indicators without building the trading framework that decides when to use which. And the original edition predates the era of free, ubiquitous online charting, so some discussion of charting mechanics has aged.

Worth keeping on the shelf as a reference for anyone who reads charts. Not the book to read straight through to learn how to actually build a trading system — use it to look up indicators you encounter elsewhere.

Read next

About Steven B Achelis

Read more from Steven B Achelis and explore the full bibliography on ClearValue Books.