Trading: Technical Analysis Masterclass
Rolf Schlotmann & Moritz Czubatinski · 2019 · 113 pages
This is a plain-English map of standard technical analysis: candlesticks, chart patterns, trend lines, support and resistance, and the four major indicators, all tied to one idea, that every signal reflects a shifting balance between buyers and sellers. It teaches you to read a chart, not trade one profitably.
The one idea
The book's whole pitch is that memorizing chart patterns is the wrong way to learn technical analysis. Instead, every candlestick, pattern, and indicator reading should be understood as one thing: a snapshot of who currently controls the market, buyers or sellers, and whether that control is shifting. A trader who understands the underlying buyer-seller fight can interpret a chart they have never seen before, instead of pattern-matching against a memorized list.
The authors build this up in layers. Candlesticks break down into four elements (body size, shadow length, body-to-shadow ratio, and body position) that describe the immediate fight. Those candles chain into price waves, and price waves chain into swing highs and lows, which is just the classic Dow Theory definition of a trend: higher highs and higher lows for an uptrend, the reverse for a downtrend. Classic formations like the head-and-shoulders, cup and handle, triangles, and wedges are then reframed as nothing more than visual records of that swing structure shifting. Support and resistance gets a specific twist: the authors argue a level does not get stronger with more touches, it gets weaker, because each touch absorbs some of the standing buy or sell interest until nothing is left to defend the level.
On indicators, the book's most useful contribution is debunking overbought and oversold as reversal signals. An RSI above 70 or a Stochastic above 80 usually just confirms a strong trend is intact, not that it is about to turn. The signal the authors actually trust is divergence: price making a new high or low while the indicator does not.
What it actually teaches
The book teaches chart reading as a top-down sequence, and each step below is how it is actually presented, chapter by chapter.
READ THE SINGLE CANDLE
Score each candlestick on four elements: body size (longer body, stronger side), shadow length (longer shadow, more indecision), body-to-shadow ratio (a strong trend shows small shadows), and body position (a long shadow on one side with the body on the other is a pinbar or rejection candle).
CHAIN CANDLES INTO SWING STRUCTURE
Follow the price path into up and down price waves, then mark the end of each wave as a swing high or swing low. An uptrend requires higher highs and higher lows (Dow Theory); the first lower low after a run of higher highs is the book's trigger for calling a trend broken.
NAME THE CHART PHASE
Classify the current stretch of chart as one of five phases: trend, correction (a short move against the trend), consolidation (sideways), breakout (the transition out of consolidation), or trend reversal (a correction that keeps going until it becomes a new trend).
DRAW LEVELS WITH THREE CONTACT POINTS, AS ZONES NOT LINES
A trend line or a support/resistance level only counts once price has reacted to it three separate times. The book insists on zones instead of single price lines, because price rarely respects an exact line and traders get stopped out early or miss entries chasing precision that isn't there.
STACK CONFLUENCE BEFORE ACTING
Combine two or more of the above (a candlestick pattern landing on a support zone, a trend line break confirmed by a new swing low, a chart pattern forming at a prior resistance) before treating a setup as tradeable. A single signal alone is explicitly called insufficient.
CONFIRM WITH ONE INDICATOR PER GROUP
Pick at most one momentum indicator (RSI, default 14 periods, or Stochastic, default 14 or 5 periods), one trend indicator (moving averages, commonly 21, 50, 100, or 200 periods, or MACD at the standard 12/26/9 settings), and one volatility indicator (Bollinger Bands, the book's own preference is 2.5 standard deviations against the 2.0 default, on a 20-period MA). Using two indicators from the same group just repeats the same signal and inflates conviction.
What it looks like Monday morning
A reader coming off this book stops treating chart patterns as a checklist to spot and starts asking what the buyers and sellers are actually doing at each point on the chart. Concretely: they stop drawing support and resistance as thin lines and start drawing zones, they stop selling into an overbought RSI or Stochastic reading on the assumption that high means due for a reversal, and they start looking for RSI or Stochastic divergence instead as the real early warning.
They also pare down their indicator stack. If they were running RSI, Stochastic, and Williams %R together, this book's argument is that two of those three are just redundant noise from the same momentum group, and the fix is to keep one indicator per group (momentum, trend, volatility) and drop the rest.
| Scenario | 5-period low | 5-period high | Close | Formula | Stochastic %K |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| High Stochastic | $60 | $100 | $95 | (95-60)/(100-60) x 100 | 88% |
| Low Stochastic | $50 | $80 | $55 | (55-50)/(80-50) x 100 | 17% |
The book uses these two examples to argue that a Stochastic near 88 (overbought) or 17 (oversold) just means price closed near the edge of its recent range, not that a reversal is coming.
Once a trader understands how to interpret the price information in the right context, he/she can immediately understand and trade with any price chart.Schlotmann & Czubatinski, Trading: Technical Analysis Masterclass
Where it fails
- Every claim rests on one cherry-picked chart. Each pattern (head-and-shoulders, wedges, RSI divergence, Bollinger reversals) is illustrated with a single hand-picked chart pulled from TradingView. There is no backtest, no win rate, no sample size anywhere in the 113 pages, so a statement like 'the neckline break confirms the reversal' is asserted through one example, never measured across many.
- The one cited study doesn't actually back the method being taught. The book cites Caginalp and Laurent (1998) to claim multi-candle patterns like Three White Soldiers 'could enable correct predictions of up to 75%,' but that figure comes from a narrow 1990s stock dataset the authors never revisit or apply to the forex and commodity charts used throughout the rest of the book. It functions as a footnote of authority, not evidence for the specific setups being taught.
- The book overturns a mainstream TA rule with its own unproven rule. In section 6.2.4 the authors write that conventional technical analysis says a level gets stronger with more touches, then say 'I cannot fully agree with this' and substitute their own 'order absorption' theory, that each touch weakens a level, backed by exactly one annotated Silver chart and no statistics.
- It doubles as a funnel to the authors' other paid products. The text repeatedly points to tradeciety.com for cheat sheets, a webinar, and a '10-step process,' and the foreword name-drops the authors' own trading journal software, EdgeWonk. The free book teaches vocabulary; the strategies with actual entries, stops, and targets live behind the links.
- No costs, position sizing, or risk management anywhere. None of the 113 pages touch spread, slippage, commission, or how much of an account to risk on a signal. A reader could execute every pattern in the book exactly as described and still have no idea how to size a trade or survive a losing streak.
- Self-published, one printing, never revised since February 2019. The copyright page lists a single 1st version dated 19.02.2019 with no later editions. The 'timeless' framing of the method is never tested against what actually happened in markets after publication, including the 2020 volatility spike and the retail trading boom that followed.
Who it is for
Buy it if
A complete beginner who has never read a candlestick or drawn a trend line, and wants one coherent, non-memorization vocabulary for chart patterns, swing structure, and the four major indicator families before building or buying an actual tested strategy elsewhere.
Skip it if
Anyone who already knows what a doji, moving average, or RSI is, or who wants a quantified, backtested system with a stated win rate and risk model. This book explains how to look at a chart; it does not hand you an edge or the risk management to trade one.
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