Swing & Trend
The Complete Trading Course: Price Patterns, Strategies, Setups, and Execution Tactics
A tidy, well-sequenced introduction to classical technical analysis that is far stronger on diagnosis than on setups. The best hundred pages explain why your indicator printed money for two months and then lost eight times running, and what to switch on instead. The words 'complete course' are the publisher's, not a description.
The one idea
The book exists to give you an order of operations. Most traders open a chart and look at whatever indicator is loudest. Rosenbloom argues you have to answer three questions in a fixed sequence before you are allowed to have an opinion: what is the trend, is momentum agreeing with it, and is price currently squeezed into a range or running out of one. Only after those three answers do you get to choose an indicator, and only then do you get to choose a trade.
The payoff is the third question, which he calls the Price Alternation Principle. Price alternates between contraction (a range with a ceiling, a floor, and a fair-value midpoint) and expansion (a breakout with no reference levels at all). Different tools work in each. Stochastics, RSI, and Bollinger Bands are close to money-printers inside a range and are actively dangerous in a trend, because in a downtrend oversold just becomes more oversold. Moving averages are the reverse: excellent for buying pullbacks in a trend, useless when they go flat and price chops straight through them. This is the answer to the most common complaint in retail trading, which is that an indicator worked beautifully and then betrayed you. It did not betray you. The regime changed and you did not.
Everything else in the book hangs off that frame. The four trade types (fade, reversal, breakout, retracement) each belong to a specific regime. Candlesticks, Fibonacci retracements, chart patterns, and Elliott waves are presented not as separate disciplines but as ways to fine-tune an entry once the frame has already told you which direction to lean. The author is explicit that he is compressing four other authors' books to do it.
What it actually teaches
The book answers one question, 'where do I start on this chart?', with a fixed seven-step sequence.
CLASSIFY THE TREND
Run two tests together. Pure Price: an uptrend is higher swing highs and higher swing lows. On a daily chart he defines a real swing as a 5 to 15 percent move lasting one to six months. Under 5 percent or under a month is too narrow and will trick you into calling reversals early. Moving Average: price above the 20 EMA, the 20 above the 50, and both above the 200 SMA is what he calls the most bullish orientation possible. A daily uptrend is officially dead only when price breaks the 20 then the 50, the 20 crosses under the 50, price closes under the 200, and both short averages cross under the 200. On weekly charts he drops the 200 test entirely and uses the 20-week crossing the 50-week, because waiting for the 200-week takes forever. His worked example: the 2009 bull market became official on July 30, 2009, when the Dow closed above the January 2009 high of 9,088.
ASK IF MOMENTUM AGREES
Use unbounded oscillators only, never RSI or stochastics, and ignore the zero line completely. The only comparison that matters is oscillator swing highs against price swing highs. A new price high plus a new oscillator high says expect another high after the pullback, which is your green light for a retracement buy. A new price high with a lower oscillator high is a divergence, which is a warning and not a short signal. His preferred tool is Linda Raschke's 3/10 oscillator: a MACD set to 3, 10, 16, or 3, 10, 1 to strip the signal line (3, 10, 0 on StockCharts), using simple rather than exponential averages. One divergence swing is a take-profit signal. Three swings is entry-grade. The mirror image, a new oscillator high while price has made no new high, he calls a Kickoff, and it is his earliest reversal tell.
NAME THE REGIME BEFORE PICKING INDICATORS
Decide whether price is contracting or expanding, then pick tools to match. In his Sears Holdings walkthrough, a five-period stochastic and RSI fired four consecutive buy signals into a slide from $150 to $115 and never once printed an overbought reading to get you out, because in a positive feedback loop there is no oversold. Bollinger Bands (20-period, two standard deviations) failed the same way, giving five buy signals on the way down and five sell signals on a rally from $130 to $165. ADX is his regime meter: above 30 means expansion, below 20 means no trend, below 15 means a deep squeeze, 20 to 30 is transition. He also scans for ADX under 20 to build a watchlist of stocks about to break.
FIND WHERE THE LINES STACK UP
Entries come from confluence, meaning three or more reference levels landing on the same price: a rising 20 or 50 EMA meeting a Fibonacci retracement (38.2, 50, or 61.8 percent) at a prior support line, ideally with a reversal candle sitting on it. He treats 61.8 percent as the boundary between a pullback and a reversal, so stops go just under the 61.8 line. Candlestick coverage is deliberately narrow: about eight forms (marabozu, doji, spinning top, gravestone doji, dragonfly doji, hammer, shooting star, engulfing) and he drops the rest on the grounds that professional technicians do not use them.
PICK ONE OF FOUR TRADE TYPES
Everything reduces to four setups in two families. Mean reversion covers fades (buy the range floor, sell the ceiling) and reversals. Mean departure covers breakouts and retracements. Each maps to a phase of the price life cycle: fades in the accumulation range, breakouts at the exit from it, retracements all the way through the trend, reversals only after the full weight-of-evidence sequence. He grades them by edge type, and the tradeoff is the whole point. Fades and retracements have higher win rates and smaller targets. Breakouts and reversals win under half the time and pay in size. His hard rule for new traders: never fade an established trend.
SIZE THE POSITION FROM THE STOP
Place the stop where the chart says the idea is wrong, then let arithmetic pick the share count. Working example: a $100,000 account risking 2 percent, so $2,000. A $30 stock with a stop at $25 is $5 of risk, so $2,000 divided by $5 is 400 shares, or $12,000 committed, 12 percent of the account. Tighten the stop to $27.50 and you get 800 shares. Tighten it to $29 and you get 2,000 shares worth $60,000, which blows through his own cap of 33 percent per position, so the trade gets rejected. That is the awkward part he is honest about: the tightest, best-looking stops are exactly the ones this model refuses.
RUN A NAMED SETUP
Two originals close the book. The Cradle Trade: wait for multi-swing divergence, then price breaking both the 20 and 50 EMA, then the two averages crossing (the crossover point is the 'cradle'), then price retracing back into that crossover. Enter there, put the stop just past it, target a full trend reversal. His Parker-Hannifin short entered at $77.16 on December 26, 2007, stop above $78, target the $60 prior support line, which price reached about a month later (the book misprints the year as 2009). The Impulse Buy: price and momentum make a new high together, price pulls back to the rising 20 EMA, ideally in a three-wave ABC shape, buy at the average, stop under the 61.8 percent retracement or the 50 EMA, target the prior high if conservative or hold past it if aggressive. Neither setup comes with a tested win rate.
What it looks like Monday morning
Strip the chart. Price, a 20 EMA, a 50 EMA, a 200 SMA, and one unbounded momentum oscillator set to 3, 10, 1 with simple averages. Delete the stochastic and the RSI unless you have first established that the chart is range-bound. Then, before you look for a trade, write down two words: the trend (up, down, or sideways, per the swing and moving-average tests) and the regime (contracting or expanding, per your own trendlines with ADX as a slow confirmation). Those two words eliminate three of the four trade types before you have risked a dollar. That single filter is what most people are actually buying this book for.
Then open your trade log. If you have 30 closed trades, calculate expectancy: average win times win rate, minus average loss times loss rate. Look hard at your single largest loss of the month and answer one question honestly, which is whether it came from ordinary probability or from you widening a stop. That question, and the arithmetic behind it, is worth more than every chart pattern in the middle of the book.
| Trader | Style | Avg win | Win rate | Avg loss | Loss rate | Expectancy per trade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Joe | Retracement swing | $500 | 60% | $300 | 40% | +$180 |
| Jane | Breakout | $5,000 | 30% | $500 | 70% | +$1,150 |
| Jim | Reversal | $500 | 85% | $5,000 | 15% | -$325 |
Jim wins nearly nine trades out of ten and still bleeds the account, because three of his nine monthly losers ran to $10,000 each.
A caution light is not a red light; in fact, caution only means to slow down.Corey Rosenbloom, The Complete Trading Course
Where it fails
- It does not earn the word complete, and the author says so himself. The preface admits each chapter could be its own book and that he is cutting to the essentials of other people's work. He is not exaggerating. Candlesticks get eight forms with harami, morning and evening stars, dark cloud cover, piercing lines, and three white soldiers omitted entirely. Fibonacci gets retracements only, no extensions and no time projections. Elliott Wave gets three rules and one example. Chapters 4 through 7 are a competent index card for Nison, Bulkowski, Boroden, and Frost and Prechter, all of whom appear in the bibliography. A reader expecting a full curriculum is buying summaries of four books plus one chapter of original material.
- Not one of his own setups comes with a number. The book spends a whole chapter arguing that you must know your accuracy edge and your monetary edge or you should not trade, then never reports either figure for the Cradle Trade, the Impulse Buy, or the Impulse Sell. No backtest, no sample size, no win rate, no drawdown, no holding period distribution. The only hard statistic anywhere is borrowed from Thomas Bulkowski, that symmetrical triangles tend to break out 66 to 75 percent of the way to the apex. You are handed a probability-first framework and asked to apply it to setups whose probability was never measured.
- Ninety-six charts, and every failure belongs to a hypothetical idiot. When a method loses in this book, the losses are assigned to an invented strawman: the trader who took seven straight reversal losses in Johnson and Johnson, or the one who stayed short Sears Holdings from $125 to $160. There is no figure captioned 'here is my Cradle Trade that stopped out and why.' Worse, the March 2009 bottom is the demonstration case in chapters 1, 2, 7, and 9. The book was written in 2010, about a year off that low, and the single most-studied reversal in modern market history is doing an enormous amount of work in the argument. This is exactly the selection standard the author's own chapter 8 tells you to distrust.
- The execution chapter is priced in 2010 dollars and is now arithmetically wrong. It walks you through comparing a $10 flat commission against a broker charging $0.01 per share, and calculates that 1,250 round trips a year costs $25,000 in commissions, meaning a $50,000 account needs a 50 percent annual return just to break even. Zero-commission US equity trading arrived in 2019 and that entire calculation collapses. The slippage logic survives intact, and the advice on market versus limit orders is still sound, but any reader who takes the cost arithmetic at face value will reject a trading frequency that is now perfectly viable. It also tells swing traders to avoid the first and last 15 to 30 minutes of the session, which was reasonable then and is a much larger and more complicated question now.
- It assumes a six-figure account, a charting platform you can customize, and a scanner. The position-sizing chapter's worked example starts at $100,000 and the percent-risked model explicitly rejects a trade because 2,000 shares of a $30 stock would be 60 percent of it. Run the same model on $10,000 and you buy 40 shares, and the profit will not cover the round trip. The signature oscillator requires manually rebuilding a MACD as 3, 10, 1 with simple moving averages (he gives the TradeStation recipe, and 3, 10, 0 for StockCharts), which many platforms will not do. The ADX watchlist idea needs a screener. And short selling is central to half the setups, the Bearish Cradle, the Impulse Sell, and the head and shoulders, with no discussion at all of locates, borrow cost, or hard-to-borrow names.
- The regime indicator that tells you which indicators to trust is the slowest thing on the chart. Chapter 3's argument is the book's best contribution, but it is demonstrated almost entirely on one stock, Sears Holdings from 2005 to 2006, reused across five consecutive figures. And the ADX confirmation he offers arrives late by his own accounting: in the eBay example, price broke out on March 5, 2010, and ADX did not cross 30 until March 23, almost a full month later. He concedes this and tells you to watch price instead. Which means the practical version of his best idea is a judgment call about your own hand-drawn trendlines, not a rule, and it will read very differently to two traders looking at the same chart.
- It quietly does not work for the part-time trader it claims to serve. The preface pitches this to people who do evening research and place orders before leaving for work. Then every entry rule in chapters 9 and 10 is discretionary and intraday-sensitive: buy 'as close as possible' to the 20 EMA, or on a break above the high of a reversal candle, or hold through a stop-gun where the market takes out tight stops before resuming. The showcase bull flag is a 15-minute Visa chart. The U.S. Steel walkthrough drops to a 30-minute chart to time the fill, and the entire edge in that example (an 8-to-1 reward to risk versus 3.5-to-1) comes from being at the screen. A limit order left overnight cannot do any of that.
Who it is for
Buy it if
You have a screen full of indicators and no idea which one to believe on any given day. This lands hardest for the trader one to three years in who makes money in one market condition and gives it all back in the other, and who has never once calculated their own expectancy. It is also a good fit for a self-taught chartist who can name the patterns but has never been told which price principle each one rests on.
Skip it if
You already own Pring, Bulkowski, Douglas, and Van Tharp. This book summarizes all four, cites all four, and you will be paying again for material you have in more depth. Skip it if you want tested setups with reported win rates and drawdowns, because there is not a single one in here. And skip it if you cannot watch a chart during the session, because the entries that carry the reward-to-risk numbers all need you there.
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