The Library Book That Started My Obsession With Market Data

When I was 13 or 14, around 1979, I walked to the local library one rainy afternoon because baseball practice got cancelled. I never got the message, so I showed up with my glove, saw the empty field, and just kept walking.

By then I had already burned through most of the history and science shelves, so I wandered into the tiny investing section. Dusty binders, old hardcovers, the corner people rarely ever touched.

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That is where I found it.

A Strategy of Daily Stock Market Timing for Maximum Profit by Joseph E. Granville.

The title alone sounded like a secret manual. For a kid who was just starting to wonder how money actually moved, it hooked me.

I opened it expecting dry charts and finance jargon. Instead I got 55 daily indicators, a practical method for figuring out the next day’s market, a clear explanation of the 200-day moving average, and Granville’s point about how the public is usually dead wrong at major turning points.

I probably only understood 20 percent of it, maybe less, on the first read. But I kept going back. I must have read that book close to 20 times over the next few months. I drew charts in notebooks, followed the Dow in the newspaper, and studied the most active list every single day like it held the answers.

Granville was a real character. He later became known for opening seminars by sliding down a wire in a tuxedo. But underneath the theatrics, he was a serious technician. He created On-Balance Volume and helped turn the 200-day moving average into something every trader knew. And he wrote one of the first market timing books a curious kid could actually sit down and learn from.

I wonder where that original copy is now? I wonder if anyone else was as drawn to it as I was.

It absolutely lit the fuse on my obsession with market data, patterns, indicators, and turning all of it into systems. Hopefully you’ll enjoy it as much as I did.

The book is now in the public domain, so I uploaded a clean digital copy to my website. It is the same one I found by accident that rainy afternoon after practice got cancelled.

You can grab your copy here

Have a Great Night!

Dave Johnson

TradingTimeMachine.com

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