This is What Technical Analysis Was Like in the 70's
Earlier this week I walked over to the MTA headquarters to find out what Ralph Acampora was talking about the other day. If you recall, at the end of our one-on-one interview, Ralph said that I had to go check out the walls inside the conference room at the Market Technicians Association HQ down on Broadway.
Let me tell you guys how awesome this room is. Ralph apparently found his old hand drawn charts from the 70s and wallpapered the conference room the same way he them in the old days. Everything is up there from the Dow Jones Industrial Average, to the Transports, Advancing Issues vs Declining issues, New Highs / New Lows, Advancing Volume / Total Volume....all written by hand and manually calculated. I can't imagine a world where you can't just press a button and get 100 years of data in seconds (and then complain about how long it took). We take a lot of this stuff for granted, that's for sure.
How cool is this?
Look at 1974. They had to extend the paper in order to calculate the extremes in New Highs / New Lows. Could you imagine?
Dow Theory 1980-82:
This is the black book where they would make all of the calculations. No Excel back then:
Amazing stuff. Thanks Ralph!
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