Ralph Acampora

Ralph Acampora, CMT, is celebrating his 50^th Anniversary on Wall Street this year. He began his career as an assistant to the famous technician, Alan R. Shaw; together they worked at Harris, Upham & Co., which merged into Smith Barney in 1976. Both of them literally taught the “Street” technical analysis in the evenings at the New York Institute of Finance. Ralph, along with John Brooks, started the Market Technicians Association (now known as the CMT Association) in 1970 and five years later Ralph created the first formal library on this subject. In 1980 he joined Kidder Peabody & Co., and created his famous “War Room” of charts in Wall Street – one of these charts (8’ high X 22’ long) is now in the Smithsonian Institute. He founded the International Federation of Technical Analysts (IFTA) and was its first Chairman. In 1990 he joined Prudential Securities – a position he held for over 15 years. His proudest achievement was heading up a small contingent of technicians on Friday, December 17, 2004, to address the SEC on the importance of technical analysis. As a result of this historic meeting, FINRA, now acknowledges that the Chartered Market Technicians designation (CMT) is equivalent to the Chartered Financial Analysts (CFA) certification. The law-of-the-land now reads: “There are officially two analysts on Wall Street. One is a fundamentalist who follows companies and has a CFA and the other is a technician who follows stocks and has a CMT”.

He is a frequent guest on the popular TV business shows: CNBC, Mornings with Maria Bartiromo and Bloomberg. And Ralph often speaks at universities around the country and globally as a lecturer on the subject of technical analysis.

Books by Ralph Acampora