HOW TO BUY: An Insider's Guide to Making Money in the Stock Market

A chart-crammed guide to equity investment from one of Wall Street's more persuasive exponents of technical theory--on an advanced, professional level. Mamis, co-author (with brother Robert) of the estimable When to Sell (1977), does not try to deprecate fundamentalists whose stock-in-trade is projecting earnings, dividends, book values, and related measures of corporate worth. Instead, he concentrates on documenting his conviction that the market moves mainly on supply/demand principles--volume trends, price swings, monetary aggregates, et al. (""The behavior of stocks themselves will tell a more important story than headlines. . . ."") He wants to be in issues with smart-money support--as evidenced by, for example, against-the-grain upticks during the latter stages of a major selloff (like the Hunt-induced silver panic early in 1980). As it happens, unearthing prospectively rewarding aberrations is an exacting, time-consuming task which requires vigilance, patience, a flair for figures, and, on the evidence of the text's graphic material, keen eyesight. Examining the tools of the technician's trade, Mamis focuses on such putative indicators of investor sentiment as the odd-lot/short-sale and call/put ratios--plus benchmarkets of market strength like the advance/decline and high/low indexes. Superior interpretive powers are an obvious requisite of success, and Mamis does not flinch from this handicap, conceding the possibility (if not probability) of misleading signals and other misfortunes involving hard-to-spot clues. Sound but ultrasophisticated; chiefly for tape readers.