Technical Analysis – talking about graphs?

Haven’t posted in a while and have a few ‘deep’ posts that await finishing, so here is s quick note. Just read an interesting piece by Margery Mayall, in the Journal of Sociology, titled: “Attached to their style: Traders, Technical Analysis and postsocial relationships”. The paper uses the notion of postsocial relationship to conceptualize the connections between traders and the trading style they use. The trading style that the paper focuses on is Technical Analysis (TA) and the empirical material is drawn from interviews with traders. There are many issues in the paper that call for discussion, and I may get back to it when I have more time. However, one comment that I have to make at this stage is about the lack of images in a paper that discusses financial TA. After all, TA (at least the most frequently-used form of that trading style) is based fundamentally on the analysis, calculative or symbolic-metaphorical, of graphical representations. I believe that TA is the financial trading instrument to which the Marshall Mcluhan’s saying ‘the medium is the message’ is the most appropriate. Assuming that we focus on how TA is actually performed, I would think that would be extremely difficult to explain TA without graphs and, such a description-analysis would run the risk of . Now, after this criticism, I suppose that I have to provide at least one relevant graphical image. So, here we go, a TA classic – a graph representing the support and resistance trend lines.