FOREX: On-Line Manual for Successful Trading
Unattributed · 2000 · 141 pages
A no-author broker handout that walks through Dow theory, chart patterns, and every standard oscillator formula in one pass. It reads like class notes assembled from other people's books, useful as a reference shelf but never assembled into something you can trade.
The one idea
The manual has no single method. It is a survey course: currency basics and the Fed in chapters 1 and 2, market structure and options greeks in chapter 3, fundamental drivers like PPP and trade balance in chapter 4, then technical analysis proper in chapters 5 and 6, and institutional risk controls in chapter 7. Each section defines terms and moves on.
The technical analysis chapter is where the real content sits. It runs through Dow theory's three trends and three phases, the standard reversal patterns (head-and-shoulders, double and triple tops, rounding tops, diamonds), continuation patterns (flags, pennants, triangles, wedges), then the full toolkit of moving averages and oscillators, closing with a Fibonacci and Elliott Wave chapter.
None of it is original. The book's own bibliography names its sources: Cornelius Luca's two books on global currency trading and technical analysis, Steven Achelis's 'Technical Analysis from A to Z,' and Edwards and Magee's 'Technical Analysis of Stock Trends.' This is those books condensed into a manual, most likely handed out by a broker (the page footers in chapters 5 through 7 carry a 'forexSwiss.com' watermark) rather than a text with its own point of view.
What it actually teaches
The manual presents technical analysis as a stack of tools rather than a sequence, so here are its four components in the order a chart reader would actually apply them.
READ THE TREND AND ITS SCALE
Classify the market as primary, secondary, or minor per Dow theory, with a major trend expected to run over a year, secondary trends lasting months, and short-term trends lasting weeks. A secondary correction typically retraces one-third, one-half, or two-thirds of the primary move; past 66 percent the book calls it a trend failure, not a pullback.
DRAW TRENDLINES AND TEST THE BREAK
A trendline needs two points to draw and a third to confirm. The manual sets a 3 percent price filter to validate a breakout, meaning the price has to clear the line by that margin before you treat the break as real rather than noise.
CONFIRM REVERSAL PATTERNS ON VOLUME
For head-and-shoulders, double tops, and double bottoms, the neckline break has to happen on heavy volume or the manual calls it a false breakout likely to snap back. The price target is measured from the point the neckline broke, not from the middle of the pattern, and the projected move equals the height from the head (or the double top) to the neckline.
TIME ENTRIES WITH MOVING AVERAGES AND OSCILLATORS
The book suggests running three moving averages together, commonly 4/9/18, 5/20/60, or 7/21/90 days, and reading crossovers between the shorter and longer lines as buy or sell signals. Layer oscillators for overbought and oversold reads: stochastics %K/%D flag warnings at 70/30 and reversals under 10 or over 90; RSI (14-day originally, 9-day more common by the time this was written) warns at 70/30 with overbought above 85 and oversold below 15; the Larry Williams %R runs on a reversed scale, flagging bullish under 80 and bearish over 20.
SET TARGETS AND STOPS WITH FIBONACCI RATIOS
The manual lists three retracement families: Dow's traditional 33/50/66 percent, the Fibonacci 38.2/50/61.8 percent, and Gann's one-eighth increments. Its stated use is to place a stop just past the expected retracement level (for example, just below 61.8 percent) so a correction that runs deeper than planned gets you out before it becomes a trend change.
What it looks like Monday morning
There is no strategy here to put on a chart Monday morning. What a reader actually gets is a checklist of vocabulary and threshold numbers, useful for looking up what a stochastic reading of 85 means or what a diagonal triangle looks like, but nothing that tells you which of these dozen tools to use together or how to size a position once a signal fires.
The most practical habit to take from it is the 3 percent breakout filter and the neckline-volume rule for chart patterns: treat any reversal pattern break on light volume as suspect, and wait for confirmation past a percentage buffer rather than acting on the first touch of a line.
| Oscillator | Warning zone | Reversal signal |
|---|---|---|
| Stochastics (%K/%D) | 70 / 30 | Buy under 10, sell over 90 |
| RSI (9 or 14-day) | 70 / 30 | Overbought above 85, oversold below 15 |
| Larry Williams %R | n/a (reversed 0-100 scale) | Bullish under 80, bearish over 20 |
| Commodity Channel Index | +100 / -100 | Buy above +100, sell below -100 |
All four thresholds are stated in the book without a worked example applying them to actual price data.
A trendline exists until it is broken as a result of a significal move of the price up or down.Unattributed, FOREX: On-Line Manual for Successful Trading
Where it fails
- No author, no original research. The PDF carries no named author, no publisher, no ISBN, and no copyright page. Word metadata shows it was authored under the generic template name 'Preferred Customer' and created December 2001. The bibliography admits its content is drawn from Cornelius Luca's and Steven Achelis's books; this is a condensed handout, most plausibly a broker's client-education manual (the running footer in chapters 5 through 7 reads 'forexSwiss.com'), not a text with its own tested method.
- Volume rules that do not apply to the market it is written for. The book repeatedly requires heavy volume to confirm a breakout (the head-and-shoulders neckline break, the double top, the envelope model), but it also admits, in the same chapter, that true volume and open interest figures do not exist in the spot forex market and must be estimated by 'extrapolating' from futures data or by 'feeling' the number of calls on dealing systems. A retail spot trader following this manual's own rules cannot actually measure the signal it tells them to wait for.
- Every formula, no worked example. Stochastics, RSI, momentum, rate of change, and Williams %R are all given as raw formulas (for instance, RSI = 100 minus [100 / (1 + RS)]) with no single worked calculation run against real price data anywhere in the chapter. A reader has to build and test every one of these from scratch before knowing whether the tool behaves as described.
- The risk chapter is written for a bank trading desk, not a retail trader. Chapter 7 covers position limits, loss limits, and settlement risk in terms of what 'senior officers' and 'top management' set at a dealing center. There is no position-sizing formula, no risk-per-trade percentage, and no guidance usable by an individual trading a retail account.
- It is a list, not a system. By the end of the indicators section the manual has introduced moving averages, MACD, stochastics, momentum, RSI, rate of change, Williams %R, CCI, Bollinger Bands, Parabolic SAR, and the Directional Movement Index, one after another, closing only with the observation that 'traders use different combinations.' It never says which combination works, when one tool should override another, or how to resolve two indicators giving opposite signals.
- The technology framing is from 2001, not today. The manual describes traders judging volume by phone call noise on dealing desks and reading printed weekly charts from services like Commodity Perspective. Every retail platform now streams live tick volume and charting; the workarounds this book spends pages explaining are no longer the problem a trader has.
Who it is for
Buy it if
You want a free, fast glossary of standard technical analysis terms, chart patterns, and indicator formulas in one place, and you are going to do the actual strategy-building and backtesting yourself. It is also fine background if you are new to forex and want the market-structure chapters (currencies, exchange systems, the Fed) before jumping into charts.
Skip it if
You are looking for a trading method, a backtested edge, or anything with a real author standing behind the claims. Everything useful in here already exists, better explained with worked examples, in the Luca and Achelis books this manual is drawn from.
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