High Profit Candlestick Patterns by Stephen Bigalow As a supplement to this week’s ChartSpeak, we are going to do a book review of a new book that just hit the market last month. Stephen Bigalow, who wrote the well received Profitable Candlestick Trading: Pinpointing Market Opportunities to Maximize Profits, has written a follow up titled High Profit Candlestick Patterns. The first thing that jumped out at us when reading this second book is that Bigalow focuses only on what he considers to be the 12 major candles. A quick glance through any “encyclopedia of candlesticks” would reveal well over 100 items but in reality, many of them either never form or are so rare that learning them and committing them to memory is a waste. Bigalow cuts to the chase and deals only with the 12 candles that form most often and are most predictable. -- continued on next page -- Each of the major candles are dealt with individually. A complete description with candle criteria is offered along with numerous visual chart examples using real stocks – not hypothetical XYZ stocks. But that’s just the beginning. Bigalow talks about how candlestick patterns are best used in conjunction with widely accepted and followed technical signals such as moving averages and stochastics. Everything is explained in clear, easy-to-understand language and numerous examples are given to help drive each point home. But what are trading techniques without entry, exit and stop loss strategies? These are discussed too. He even spends an entire chapter talking about using candles to trade gaps. And if that wasn’t enough, Bigalow recruited Bill Johnson, author of many option trading books, to write a chapter on using candlesticks to trade options. There are no Holy Grails in trading. All methods work some of the time, but no method works all the time. We consider High Profit Candlestick Patterns to be a solid addition to any trader’s library. It’s available at amazon.com and is worth checking out. Jason Leavitt Leavitt Brothers, LLC