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Ratings & Reviews for

Japanese Candlestick Charting Techniques: A Contemporary Guide to the Ancient Investment Techniques of the Far East

Steve Nison

5 stars
965 (55%)
4 stars
498 (28%)
3 stars
200 (11%)
2 stars
51 (2%)
1 star
39 (2%)
Displaying 1 - 30 of 105 reviews
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Terry Kim
161 reviews11 followers
October 25, 2015
A must read for any Trader / Investor. With candlestick charts there is a lot more information you can obtain about the market and the stock. Not only will it improve your probabilities of riding a trend / exiting a trade, but you will also understand the movements of the price.

Candle charting alone has improved my general understanding of stocks and the market. It is a must read for anyone delving into the markets.
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Lukifryrr
5 reviews2 followers
January 28, 2015
At first I thought this book was boring and, plainly, unhelpful. The idea of japanese candlestick has become standard in most trading softwares and their analysis almost as standard to traders. The first half of the book talks precisely about this, and it gets boring and repetitive very quick.

The second half of the book, however, starts to mix the candle analysis with western technical analysis and the entire picture become much clearer and efficient. I have learned various tricks and have already implemented them into my trading technique with great success.

This book is very well worth the read for any trader.
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Greg
1,117 reviews1,876 followers
September 22, 2021
My favorite review I saw of this book was nice and short, "A worthless piece of crap. Don't be fooled. Nobody who really makes money in the market uses this stuff, and I know what I'm talking about."

I don't know what this book was like when it was first written, I can't imagine that it was really all that mind blowing, except that it maybe gave Western traders very colorful names for different types of price action. The most valuable thing about these colorful names is it kind of helps explain or give a metaphor to what could be happening on a particular candle/bar or group of candles/bars.

These days candlesticks are so commonplace that the idea of selling traders on their utility seems kind of unnecessary, but then again this book probably helped to their new massive acceptance.

The big problem I have with the book, which isn't the 'subjective' element that one reviewer complained about (which sort of misses the point I think of using any tool for trading) is that I think the examples are too clean. The author does show times when the signals fail and has a humorous introduction to the start of the chapter on Doji's where he talks about people attending his seminars as getting way too excited about Doji everywhere, and most likely using them as naked 'objective' signals.

Anyway the examples are so clean at times and lead to massive movements one might start to think 'I need to get into a trade that shows x pattern because it's going to gap up like crazy the next day', or maybe even think, why don't I just look for x pattern and then go for a low delta / out of the money Option and clean up? My guess is that will be a very disappointing endeavor.

But that's most trading books where the examples all look so good and clean in a way live charts rarely look as they are unfolding.

I think my blahness to this book is that if I'd read it when I actually took it out of the library back in the time before we wore masks I would have been enthralled by the idea of exotic sounding candle patterns and figured trading was just a matter of spotting them and I probably would have gone about trying to study the names and what they looked like.

Now reading it about 18 months after the book was due and having finally returned to the city it's more like an interesting, oh that thing that I call number 2 is an inverted hammer or shooting star, neat. Days of pouring over charts and studying how price seems to move have kind of taught me to see a lot of these patterns, maybe not know the names of them, but at least be able to understand the psychology and action behind them. I guess what I'm trying to say is I'm not sure when this book would have been good for me to read. At one point it would have been too early and I would have gotten nothing out of it, or when a lot of this is just fancy names for things I've been working on semi-obsessively for the past year or so.

Which I think leads the important part of this book, it's understanding what is happening with the bars, the colorful names do help to give a clue, like a gravestone is pretty clearly not a happy bar and with a nice military analogy sums up the candle pattern as the place where lots of bulls came to die. That's actually a kind of cool way of looking at the type of bar, and using some ideas of smart money and liquidity helps give a possibly more concrete picture what is just a couple of lines on a screen.

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Duffy Pratt
485 reviews136 followers
November 29, 2010
Very clear description of the basic candlestick patterns. Many of the patterns rely on gaps between closing and opening prices. This type of trading applies to equities and to other markets that have pretty clear opening and closing times -- like the Japanese Rice market where this charting technique originated. The Forex market, for all practical purposes, is free of such gaps. This difference means that many candlestick patterns have only limited application to the forex markets. Thus, while there may be quite a bit to learn about candlesticks in a market filled with gaps, the material reduces to a manageable amount when you exclude any of the patterns that require a gap of some sort.

Except for the weekend close, the opening and closing periods in forex are basically arbitrary. They retain their force, I believe, because every broker uses the same break points, at least for any chart that tracks an hour or less. The weekly and monthly charts are also the same for all traders. There is some slight variation for Daily and four hour charts, depending on the broker's time zones, but these provide only slight variations for the most part. Thus, candlestick charts work because traders all rely on the same data for the fictional opening and closing points of the bars of their charts. But that fiction is enough to make a real difference, because it makes a difference in the expectations of traders, and makes a difference on when traders are likely to make their decisions.

My main criticism is his selective examples. Anyone can pick out a chart and show how it illustrates their method. And I suppose that needs to be done. But if you look closely at Nison's examples, you will see many failed signals for patterns that had already been discussed, or that would be discussed later. Nison is very good at showing where the patterns work. He also seems to be very good at ignoring the examples in his own charts where the patterns fail.

Overall, I'm a fan of candlesticks. I don't think they tell a whole lot. But they are clearer than bar charts or line charts at showing what might have happened during a time period. So, even if they don't provide much of an edge, for me they are still the clearest picture I can get.



Nicholas S.
7 reviews3 followers
May 26, 2011
Presented a method for technical analysis, based almost entirely on an appeal to the authority of Japanese rice traders from the 17th and 18th centuries, who we are told used these charting methods. I lost interest when the author conceded that the signals are subjective (I read this as: the method works; if it fails, you misinterpreted the method). Not very convincing to the skeptical reader.
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Michael Atkinson
78 reviews17 followers
November 28, 2008
A worthless piece of crap. Don't be fooled. Nobody who really makes money in the market uses this stuff, and I know what I'm talking about.
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Rahul Holani
285 reviews19 followers
October 2, 2020
4 Stars

It is a good book for candle stick and chart, but I left it in half way, as I like learning more about it through YouTube videos
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Calvin
1 review
February 19, 2022
Helps fill a missing piece in my TA in understanding why charts move certain ways and making better & informed decisions. Must read for those hoping to improve their TA game.
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Donald
Author 4 books12 followers
February 1, 2009
Candlestick charting, combined with western technical analysis (volume, RSI, moving averages) can give the patient observer an edge in the markets. It is a more visual style of charting than standard bar charts, yet uses the same information of 'open-high-low-close'.
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Kalpit
38 reviews
December 11, 2015
The best book on the subject.
Steve Nison is indeed the father of Candlesticks.

Thank You so much Steve for writing this awesome book.
I can't emphasize, how much it helped me in making profits in the market.

I will write a detailed review in a while,
Until then, Thank You again Steve Nison.
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Quang
5 reviews
December 6, 2018
Most of the patterns and techniques here are still applicable, no matter how laughable that may sounds to you at first. With the abundant availability of public historical data at the present you can even test these techniques empirically (I did) and be amazed (I was).
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MJ Jabarian
40 reviews11 followers
May 6, 2020
Markets are much more irrational than Lines and signs. Lines and signs are good tools to utilize your trading but don't think of them as they are your dictionary, think of them as human behaviors and forecast the possibilities.
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Paul DeBusschere
Author 2 books5 followers
April 21, 2014
Mr. Nison provides a clear guide to candlesticks and how to use them with Western technical analysis techniques. This book is a valuable tool that every trader should have in one's library. It is so straightforward, even someone like Burton G. Malkiel and other Random Walkers could use it to improve their results.
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Rintho Sihotang
2 reviews1 follower
March 31, 2008
Candlestick...candlestick..does whatever candlestick does..(Spiderman theme song)
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Jagatheesan Jack
39 reviews11 followers
October 17, 2015
This book gave great insights on candlestick chart reading and it's use with Western techniques.
Part B (Candlesticks with Western techniques) needed some cross referencing from other sources.
Jason
3 reviews2 followers
May 4, 2021
To me this is one of the essential books for traders. Its one of the key building blocks, in my opinion, of understanding the movement of a market, whether its a stock, bond, option, future, credit swap, crypto, commodity, it doesn't matter. To me, candlesticks are kind of like the "atoms" of market interactions. If you want to understand how water behaves and why it does what it does, you have to look at its chemistry, just as when you want to understand how a stock behaves and why it does what it does, you have to look at its candlesticks. There's obvoiusly more to a stock than candles, just like there's more to water than undestanding its molecules, there's physics too and an external envrionment, but the comparison holds true. This book goes over the anatomy of a single candle, the meanings of different single, double, and triple candle patterns, the meaning of larger groups of several candle patterns, how these candle patterns form the basis of larger chart patterns, how candles can be used with support, resistance, trend lines and indicators. Also this author is the best of any candle book author I've read, and not suprirsingly Steven Nison is the person who actually introduced candles to Wall Street from japan where they had been in use for centuries as in rice and commodity markets there. Its fascinating how such a simple tool, that essential shows the psychology of supply and demand, hasn't changed over hundreds of years, because people's psychology hasn't changed. And that's what moves stock prices in the short to medium term, people's psychology. Eventually fundamentals will shape the life of the stock, but even those will make themselves apparent in the candles on longer timeframes.
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Hiệp Lê Tuấn
66 reviews30 followers
August 16, 2020
Cuốn sách này cho mình thêm một món vũ khí kết hợp với cuốn Payback Time khi trước để tiếp tục bước tới. Nếu như đầu tư giá trị cho phép mình chọn một hàng hóa để đầu tư thì những phương pháp kỹ thuật này cho mình biết cách để tối ưu hóa lợi nhuận thu được.
Mình rất thích một câu nói: "Chỉ cần người học trò sẵn sàng, người thầy sẽ xuất hiện."
Và thời điểm này, người thầy đã xuất hiện. Lối sống, cách đầu tư, cách suy nghĩ của Warrent Buffet dường như hoàn toàn phù hợp với những gì mà mình tìm kiếm và quan trọng là bên trong mình cảm thấy rất thoải mái khi tìm hiểu và đọc về ông. Cực kỳ, cực kỳ nhiều mặt, thói quen, hành động của ông đều khiến mình yêu thích. Mình đã và đang áp dụng những kinh nghiệm mà mình rút ra được từ ông. Vậy mà có một số sai lầm mà dù đã được ông cảnh báo. mình vẫn lỡ mắc phải. Đó quả thực là bài học đáng giá, kể cả về mặt vật chất hay tinh thần.
Mình đã quyết định sẽ có một khoảng thời gian nghỉ ngơi chừng 1 quý để dồn hết tâm sức đọc, tìm hiểu và có thể học tập, mô phỏng từ ông. Hôm nay mình chắc chắn sẽ tốt hơn ngày hôm qua. Dù chỉ là 1% mà thôi.
Profile Image for Craig Hedge.
Craig Hedge
Author 9 books1 follower
April 15, 2019
What a great book!
Thoroughly enjoyed Steve Nison's book Japanese Candlestick Charting Techniques.
(I also highly recommend his other book 'The Candlestick Course' I read following this)

Reading this book has certainly taken my understanding and appreciation of candlestick charting to new levels.
The history here, the use of Japanese proverbs, and the hundreds of years behind the technology, certainly adds weight to the techniques.

The fact the author was a pioneer bringing candle stick charting to the western world demonstrates the effort, understanding, the challenges in translation, and the body of work in completing it.

There are a few small editing errors in the book, however I only mention this so readers can re-read something that may not quite make sense, and of course to demonstrate that I have actually read the whole book.

To this point if I could choose just one candle stick charting book, it would be this book hands down.

Highly recommended.


Lars
11 reviews
January 12, 2021
I just love this book. It's a good technical guide that is quite easy to read. If you are completely novice you might get a little headache at start but the book has so many good examples that you'll soon start to follow along. Especially if you put some practice to it and start to gain experience. This book is a solid, easy to understand foundation to built upon. Nothing can replace experience but with the tools in this book you stand a chance of having a better chance of learning from that experience.

I own both a physical copy and the Kindle version and must say that the kindle version was a little letdown because the quality of the pictures are just rubbish. The book however is crystal sharp. This is something amazon should look into. The highlighting feature is just amazing on kindle and one I cannot be without so I do not regret getting the kindle version as well.

Regardless, because of the books content I can't give it anything else than a 5 star review from me.
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David
135 reviews5 followers
February 8, 2019
I want to start off by saying Nison did an amazing job at compiling information in a way that made sense. He took what is complicated and made it presentable. For that, I’ll give him 3 stars. I learned about doji’s and stars and hammers. I understand what dark cloud covers and hanging men imply, and I understand now what they predict. The problem though was this book didn’t read like a guide; it read like a textbook. It was dry, didn’t lack example but it certainly would’ve been better crafted had the chapters been organized different. The material is there and the examples were learned, but not something I intend to use everyday as an investor. Great for supplemental reading if you’re a short term trader. I enjoyed the history lessons most!
Zil
17 reviews1 follower
June 3, 2019
I’ve had this book in mind for 4 years., but always put it into the “read it later” cart. Because of the recent tragic trading record, I began to read it. It was astonishingly helpful. Despite of the vast difference between the US stock market and the China’s stock market, price, volume and human emotion always have something in common. I applied the techniques to my daily practice, and found I could interpret much more information than I used to. I highly recommend it as an intro to stock trading.
Adriyana Grotseva
226 reviews1 follower
July 12, 2020
Good book introducing the Japanese candlestick charts for stock analysis. It reviews some basic reversal patterns (hammer, hanging man, engulfing, dark-cloud cover, piercing pattern, morning/ evening strs, shooting star, harami, tweezers, belt-hold, crows, windows, doji, gravestone doji). It has clear review, examples, questions to check your understanding and also ties explanations with some Japanese proverbs. A very good guide for candlestick usage and how help your analysis.
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Jimbo Stark
11 reviews
August 25, 2021
Author is kind of full of himself. He doesn't miss an opportunity to remind you that nobody had ever heard of Japanese candlesticks before him and how every single soul is in his debt and that he should be canonized for it.
It got pretty old about 50 pages in and that's about the time it takes to realize that there's no useful information that one can't find in more comprehensive (and less pretentious) technical analysis books out there.
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Cameron
196 reviews7 followers
September 10, 2022
Fantastic book with tons of great info.

While this book was one of the most boring books I have ever read, taking me over 2 months to finish it has such great information. I have decided to dedicate even more time to memorizing the fundamental knowledge.

If you like to trade/ invest this book is for you. It teaches you how to read charts to better predict what is to come.

This book has tons of pictures so you have to physically read it.

Pick up a copy
Ted
2 reviews
February 11, 2021
Great book for any candlestick investor.

Plus point: very easy to understand + the graphic and their meaning are fairly easy to understand.

Bad points: the graphic are in black and white (but it was written in 2001 so...) For each graphic, the explanation is always on the next pages...not practical.
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Nixon Varghese
6 reviews
February 11, 2023
Well detailed book about trading in general

This is one of the few books that adds value to a beginner in trading. Do not expect any trading book to give you the secret sauce. What it does do is add to your understanding of the markets. Candle patterns provide you with clues about market psychology at the time of formation, and this book does a fantastic job at explaining it.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 105 reviews

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