Candlesticks have been around a lot longer than anything similar in the
Western world.
The Japanese were looking at charts as far back as the 17th century,
whereas the earliest known charts in the US appeared in the late 19th
century.
Rice trading had been established in Japan in 1654, with gold, silver
and rape seed oil following soon after.
Rice markets dominated Japan at this time and the commodity
became, it seems, more important than hard currency.
Munehisa Homma (aka Sokyu Honma), a Japanese rice trader born in
the early 1700s, is widely credited as being one of the early exponents
of tracking price action.
He understood basic supply and demand dynamics, but also identified
the fact that emotion played a part in the setting of price.
He wanted to track the emotion of the market players, and this work
became the basis of candlestick analysis.
He was extremely well respected, to the point of being promoted to
Samurai status.
The Japanese did an extremely good job of keeping candlesticks quiet
from the Western world, right up until the 1980s, when suddenly there
was a large cross-pollination of banks and financial institutions around
the world.
This is when Westerners suddenly got wind of these mystical charts.
Obviously, this was also about the time that charting in general
suddenly became a lot easier, due to the widespread use of the PC.
In the late 1980s several Western analysts became interested in
candlesticks. In the UK Michael Feeny, who was then head of TA inLondon for Sumitomo, began using candlesticks in his daily work, and
started introducing the ideas to London professionals.
In the December 1989 edition of Futures magazine Steve Nison, who
was a technical analyst at Merrill Lynch in New York, produced a paper
that showed a series of candlestick reversal patterns and explained
their predictive powers.
He went on to write a book on the subject, and a fine book it is too.
Thank you Messrs Feeny and Nison.
Since then candlesticks have gained in popularity by the year, and
these days they seem to be the standard template that most analysts work from.
tell me about this article and what do you thing for candelstick trading?