How to make money from charts

By Brian Marber

This is not your average book on technical analysis. Why? Because the author is not your average technical analyst; Brian Marber is unique -and so, as a result, is this book.

Here, Marber sets out to write about his approach, in a language readers can understand and enjoy, telling them why he does what he does, and how he came to do it, including details of market pitfalls and the occasional Marber pratfall.

The book does not claim to be comprehensive, but instead aims to be honest and to present the reader with the techniques and indicators that Marber himself uses, and has used successfully in his fifty-one years in the business.

Although when you make money you can learn something about making it, you learn far more by losing it, then finding out how to stop doing so. This book tells you his methods; when positions have gone wrong, and what you do about it.

Technical analysis is about running profits and, by using technically-oriented stops, cutting losses – not when it hurts but when, from a technical point of view, the position you’re in becomes untenable. Following a Rothschild maxim that “tops and bottoms are for fools”, Marber would also add “and for liars”. He describes technical analysis as exactly like huntin’, shootin’, and fishin’: what’s being hunted are trends, never shooting for a top nor fishing for a bottom. But before any of that you need to learn about price.

Using the same approach that he used when he taught at the International Management Institute, Geneva, he begins with price, then what price leads to: trends, support and resistance, patterns, indicators and ratios. When that has been absorbed, he moves on to stops.

Marber also shares with the reader his vast wealth of experience of his time in the business – showing you the nitty-gritty, technical analysis in real-time, warts and all, and including reports on the FTSE, gold, oil and the dollar.

This book is a must-read for anyone who really wants to understand the markets, delivered in Marber’s distinctive and unique voice.

Brian Marber can make a fair claim to be the most widely experienced technical analyst in the world, having been one since 1963.

A Fellow of the Society of Technical Analysts, he has been a blue button (stockbroker's clerk), stock market dealer, member of two UK stock exchanges, and managing partner of the London office of one of the largest regional 'broking houses.

At IOS and then at NM Rothschild & Sons, totally eschewing the fundamental approach, he was the first fund manager in the UK to manage large funds using only technical analysis.

Between 1976 and 1981, as a stockbroker, Brian Marber was voted by institutional investors No.1 technical analyst in the City for six successive years, a unique record.

When he started managing FX accounts in the 1990s, he was given exemption from the SFA Exams because of his 'long and distinguished career in the investment industry.'

In 1980, in a survey conducted by the Treasurer of the Singer Company, Brian Marber had the best FX forecasting record in the world. For 15 years he wrote monthly for Euromoney Currency Report, more recently for the Financial Times.

In the 1980s Brian Marber was a Member of the Visiting Faculty of IMI (Geneva), the oldest-established business school in Europe. In 1981 he founded a company which, with clients in 20 countries, became the world's largest independent FX consultancy.

As lecturer and teacher, Brian Marber has spoken at six Financial Times World Gold conferences, three Australian Gold Conferences, Johannesburg 100, Comex, and the Washington Gold & Silver Institute, and has also conducted seminars and teach-ins in Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Abu Dhabi, South Africa, Israel, Italy, UK, Eire, France, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland and Luxembourg.

A one-time member of the Investment Panel of The Observer and regular broadcaster on TV and radio, Brian Marber is still an FX Consultant to banks, large corporations, hedge fund companies (including Europe's oldest, Odey Asset Management), and private clients.