Point and Figure Chart - History

History

The technique is over 100 years old. "Hoyle" was the first to write about it and showed charts in his 1898 book, The Game in Wall Street. Richard Wyckoff also described the technique with charts in his 1910 classic, Studies in Tape Reading. The first book/manual dedicated to Point and Figure was written by Victor Devilliers in 1933. Chartcraft Inc, in the USA, popularized the system in the 1940s. Cohen founded Chartcraft and wrote on point and figure charting in 1947. Chartcraft published further pioneering books on P&F charting, namely those by Burke, Aby and Zieg. Chartcraft Inc is still running today, providing daily point and figure services for the US market under the name of Investors Intelligence. Veteran Mike Burke still works for Chartcraft, having started back in 1962 under the guidance of Cohen. Burke went on to train other point and figure gurus, such as Thomas Dorsey who would go on to write authoritative texts on the subject.

A detailed history can be found in Jeremy du Plessis’ ‘The Definitive Guide to Point and Figure’ where many references and examples are cited.

Du Plessis describes their development from a price recording system to a charting method. Traders kept track of prices by writing them down in columns. They noticed patterns in their price record and started referring to them first as ‘fluctuation charts’ and then as ‘figure charts’. They started using Xs instead of numbers and these charts became known as ‘point charts’. Traders used both point charts and figure charts together and referred to them as their point and figure charts, which is where Du Plessis suggests the name point and figure came from. Modern point and figure charts are drawn with Xs and Os where columns of Xs are rising prices and columns of Os are falling prices, although many tradionalists such as David Fuller and Louise Yamada still use the Xs only point method of plotting.