This is a printout of Martin Pring's slides from a recorded Online Trading Expo session, originally titled A Technician's Approach to Day Trading. It is one-line captions over chart screenshots, not a written text, and it never develops into a tradable method.
The one idea
Pring's point is that short-term (day and swing) trading is the same technical analysis he teaches for longer-term charts, just compressed into a smaller time frame. Trends still perpetuate, reversals still show up as a weight-of-the-evidence call across several indicators, and the trader is still working in probabilities, not certainties. Nothing about the toolkit changes; only the bar interval does.
The bulk of the deck walks through single- and two-bar price patterns: outside bars, inside bars, two-bar reversals, key reversal bars, exhaustion bars, and what Pring calls Pinocchio bars (bars that print a false extreme on a long wick before reversing). Each pattern gets a slide of bullet characteristics and a chart screenshot showing it once, then the deck moves on.
The last few slides cover stop placement: stops below support to protect longs, above resistance to protect shorts, and the standard argument for using them (you decide the risk in advance instead of under pressure). That is the entirety of the trade-management content.
What it actually teaches
The deck is not sequential, it is a checklist of pattern types Pring says to watch for on a short-term chart, plus one rule for exits.
PEAK AND TROUGH ANALYSIS
Pring's baseline: define the trend first by tracking whether swing highs and lows are rising or falling, the same method he uses on daily and weekly charts. The slide asks 'what constitutes a legitimate peak or trough' but the deck never actually answers it with a rule; there is no minimum swing size or bar count given.
OUTSIDE AND INSIDE BARS
An outside bar (this bar's high and low both exceed the prior bar's range) signals a sentiment reversal. An inside bar (this bar's range sits entirely inside the prior bar's) signals that buyers and sellers are momentarily matched and momentum has stalled. Both are read as one-off signals, not part of a filtered setup.
TWO-BAR REVERSALS AND KEY REVERSAL BARS
A two-bar reversal is a sharp two-bar swing in sentiment. A key reversal bar is graded stronger: price opens strongly in the direction of the prevailing trend, the bar's range is extremely wide, and the close comes back near the prior bar's close. Pring adds that it should be confirmed by climactic (unusually high) volume, though no volume threshold is given.
EXHAUSTION AND PINOCCHIO BARS
An exhaustion bar is a wide-range bar after a sharp move where the close finishes more than halfway back into the bar (more than half up in a downtrend, more than half down in an uptrend). A Pinocchio bar prints a long wick past the real extreme, then closes back inside it, giving what Pring calls a false impression of what is really going on.
PLACE THE STOP AT STRUCTURE
For a long, put the sell stop below support; for a short, put the buy-to-cover stop above resistance. Pring's case for using a hard stop at all: it forces you to accept the worst case before you're in the position, so the exit decision gets made with a level head instead of during a loss.
What it looks like Monday morning
There is not enough method here to change what a trader does Monday morning. The most a reader takes away is a vocabulary list: outside bar, inside bar, two-bar reversal, key reversal bar, exhaustion bar, Pinocchio bar, each with a one-line description and a single chart example. None of them come with a filter, a win-rate, a market condition to avoid, or a position-sizing rule attached.
The one usable habit is the stop placement logic: below support on longs, above resistance on shorts, decided before entry. That is standard risk-management advice available in dozens of other places, not something specific to this deck.
In technical analysis we are dealing in probabilities, never certainties.Martin J. Pring, Technical Analysis for Short-Term Traders
Where it fails
- It is a slide printout, not a written book. Every one of the 149 pages is a single PowerPoint slide from a recorded Online Trading Expo session. Roughly two-thirds of the pages are chart screenshots with zero extractable text; the rest carry one sentence or a three-item bullet list. There is no connective prose anywhere explaining why one pattern beats another or how to combine them.
- No worked numeric example anywhere in the deck. Every pattern (outside bar, key reversal bar, exhaustion bar, Pinocchio bar) is defined qualitatively (wide range, climactic volume, closes near the prior close) with no bar-count, percentage, or dollar figure ever attached. A reader cannot code or backtest any of it as written; every threshold has to be invented.
- The core question the deck asks, it never answers. Slide 22 poses 'What constitutes a legitimate peak or trough?', which is the load-bearing definition for the trend analysis the rest of the deck depends on. The slides that follow are chart screenshots with no caption resolving it. Whatever Pring said out loud on the recording is lost; the printout alone does not deliver the answer.
- Every pattern example shows the pattern working. Each chart screenshot is chosen because the labeled pattern led to the reversal or continuation Pring is describing. There is no slide showing a key reversal bar or exhaustion bar that failed, so a reader has no sense of the false-signal rate on any of these patterns.
- No volume, liquidity, or session-time guidance for day trading specifically. Despite the original title being A Technician's Approach to Day Trading, the deck never discusses intraday session structure (open, midday, close), typical day-trading time frames, or the volume and spread conditions that make single-bar patterns more or less reliable intraday. It is generic bar-pattern reading with 'short-term' substituted for 'daily.'
- Nothing here has been updated or tested since 2000. The deck predates decentralized electronic order flow, algorithmic market-making, and the modern prevalence of gap opens and after-hours moves that change how single-bar reversal patterns behave on liquid futures and stocks. There is no discussion of how the patterns hold up in a market structure that has moved on.
Who it is for
Buy it if
Only a reader who wants a quick refresher on classic single- and two-bar candle patterns and already owns Pring's actual books for the framework behind them. It works as a five-minute vocabulary check, not as instruction.
Skip it if
Anyone looking for a taught day-trading method, a backtestable rule set, or any numeric threshold wastes their money here. The title promises a book; what you get is a printed slide deck from a trade-show recording with the audio missing.
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