Dr. Melvin Pasternak

Dr. Melvin Pasternak bought his first stock, IBM, in 1962 when he was a teenager.

He is the author of 21 Candlesticks Every Trader Should Know, a book on how to use Japanese candlestick charts to trade effectively. For nearly five years, he wrote a very successful newsletter combining fundamental and technical analysis: The Street Authority Swing Trader.

Dr. Pasternak has addressed numerous stock market conferences and was a regular market commentator for a nationally broadcast CBC radio show. Melvin taught a university stock market course for many years. For more than a decade he instructed investment seminars at brokerage T.D. Waterhouse. Melvin holds both Ph.D. and MBA degrees.

From Melvin Pasternak ...

Hello, I'm Dr. Melvin Pasternak. Over the past three decades I've traded stocks almost daily.

Over the years, I have made 7,000 to 8,000 trades and have a dangerously high stack of brokerage receipts in my basement to prove it. Some years have been especially memorable. In 1999, the last year of the great bull market, my account size went up over 700% and I turned a profit on over 80% of my picks.

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I'm not going to thump my chest about my net worth... but let's just say my trading has been more than profitable enough to fund the lifestyle I want. My wife and I live very comfortably. We have a lovely home on some beautiful acreage. On weekends, we often go to our rural cabin on a large piece of land with 80-foot-tall spruce trees and a river running through it.

I'm not a jetsetter or a toy collector. I'd rather give what I don't need to charity and spend my scarce free time volunteering on the three boards I sit on.

I started investing young. I was born in 1944 and bought my first stock in 1962 -- while working one summer as a runner on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

I noticed IBM kept going up and up and I hated to see the ship leave port without me. So I scraped together every penny I had and bought 50 shares.

My father was very upset. He couldn't believe I was risking all the money I saved for college. I bought the stock anyway -- and made the princely sum of $1,000 -- which actually was a princely sum in 1962.

I went off to college and grad school... obtained a Ph. D. in English and then an MBA. It was while getting my MBA in 1970 that I learned the keys to fundamental analysis. Since then I have been obsessed with trading and investing.

In the late 1970s I became fascinated with classical technical analysis -- support and resistance, price patterns such as triangles or rectangles -- and studied them all.

I subscribed to chart books by earth mail -- grateful to have them even if they were two weeks late. In the early 1980s I discovered financial television. I watched FNN (the forerunner of CNBC) every night and jotted down the advancing and declining issues, up and down volume, new highs and lows and many other figures so I could create my own homemade charts and analyze them.

My S&P 500 chart grew so big I named it "monster chart." It grew to about 10 feet long and 5 feet high. To bring it to my stock market classes took an entire attaché case. I gave it a trim every so often, but like an octopus, its tentacles always seemed to grow right back.

God bless whoever created stock market software! In the early 1990s I started using Metastock and integrated its funny-sounding tools -- stochastics, moving average convergence/divergence, the parabolic stop and reverse -- into price pattern analysis.

At the same time I began teaching trading seminars at T.D. Waterhouse, which I did for 15 years. I taught at Mount Royal University for 28 years, eight of which I taught a stock market course. In 2006, I published my book on how to use Japanese candlestick charts to trade: 21 Candlesticks Every Trader Should Know.

Even after all these years, the market still fascinates me. I get up at 7 am, tune into the pre-market S&P futures and log onto my favorite financial website. Trading is an endless chess match between me and the market -- a game that the market pays me very well to play!

In each of my weekly Double-Digit Trading newsletters, my aim is twofold. First, I always give you specific stocks that I believe will make you money within a few weeks to a few months. In my earlier Swing Trader letter I had trades that jumped more than 20% in mere days. And second, I share my technical and fundamental analysis in detail... because I want to teach you how to increase your batting average when you trade on your own.

Over the years, I've taught thousands of people the basics as well as the intricate details of technical and fundamental analysis. In the process, I have helped make most of them better traders. I sincerely hope to do the same for you.

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