Intraday Trading Using Pattern Recognition
Harry Boxer
by Jayanthi Gopalakrishnan
With over 30 years of Wall Street investment and technical analysis experience, Harry Boxer is a widely syndicated and featured guest on many financial programs and websites, including CNBC, CBS MarketWatch, Winning on Wall Street, Stockhouse, DecisionPoint, and more. A former chief technical analyst and columnist for AmericaInvest.com, Harry's impressive credentials include eight years as chief technical analyst with three Wall Street brokerage firms, and the honor of winning both the 1995 and the 1996 worldwide Internet stock-market trading contest, "The Technical Analysis Challenge." You'll find Harry's daily wisdom at The Technical Trader (www.thetechtrader.com), an ongoing, real-time diary of his trading ideas and market analysis.Stocks & Commodities Editor Jayanthi Gopalakrishnan interviewed Harry Boxer via telephone on July 13, 2005.
I did months of studying and I noticed that all
the patterns that would develop
on a daily basis also developed on a one-minute,
five-minute, and 15-minute basis.
How did you get started in technical analysis?
Actually, that's a good story -- I was a teenager growing up in the New Jersey and New York area and I would spend the summers in a bungalow colony in the Catskills. The guy in the bungalow next door to me was this old, crotchety stockbroker named Hank Greenstein, who taught me about charts. At that time, computer programs didn't exist and you had to draw a chart yourself, so Hank taught me how to create my own hand-drawn charts, how to keep them and use them. When computerized programs came out, like Worden Brothers Telechart 2000 (now TC net, which I use religiously), my chart-making ability obviously became a great help.
They say that people who can draw charts by hand actually have a better understanding of chart movement.
I agree. I like to say that I've been charting for over forty years. My history is that I spent some time on Wall Street as a broker/technical analyst. I wrote a newsletter for a couple of brokerage firms called The Trader's Corner, which was completely technical.
Of course, later, when I got my first computer, the first thing I did was look at all the stocks I was interested in. I found an Internet trading contest called the "Technical Analysis Challenge," which I won in 1994 and again in 1995. So, the person in charge of the contest contacted me, and wanted to know if I wanted to start a website with him. I agreed to do it and in 1995 we started a website that was also called The Trader's Corner. At that time, not only was there much less use of the Internet, but unfortunately, there was also very little money to be made on the Internet. So, after a couple of years, I disbanded the website and went more towards personal investment and money management.
In 1999, I was contacted by a major website called AmericaInvest.com. It was really ramping up and they asked me to do a technical column for them. As it turned out, that column got more hits than all the other columns in the website combined. So, when they went down in 2001, the editor of AmericaInvest.com called me up and suggested we do a website together. That's how TheTechTrader.com was born; and it's done very well over the last four years, that's for sure.
Yes, I've seen it referred to several times. Did your trading style change much after 2001?
These days I'm much more of a short-term trader. I was a much longer-term trader before the market crashed back in 2000, 2001. My technical work took many years to develop. Although many traders took huge drawdowns and big losses during the bear market, I was fortunate enough to escape most of that. That is because I bought a home in July of 2000, and was out of the market by April and May 2000. This was right after the market started coming down. Obviously, there was some luck involved!
...Continued in the September issue of Technical Analysis of STOCKS & COMMODITIES
Excerpted from an article originally published in the September 2005 issue of Technical Analysis of STOCKS & COMMODITIES magazine. All rights reserved. © Copyright 2005, Technical Analysis, Inc.
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