The Beginner’s Trading Book on Price and Volume Read the Tape The Lost Art of Price and Volume, Taught From Your Very First Chart

Read the Tape is an 87-page beginner's book by Charles Vincent, The Chart Whisperer, published in November 2026. It teaches tape reading: reading price and volume together, bar by bar, to see which side of a market is winning. It is built on Richard Wyckoff's law of effort versus result and written for someone who has never read a chart, in plain adult language, with 40 diagrams, 2 real Ether charts and 9 drills with answers.

Reading what the market is doing from price and volume alone. The name comes from the paper ticker tape, first unveiled in New York in 1867, that printed every trade as it happened. Richard Wyckoff wrote the first book on the skill in 1910. Today every candle on your chart is the tape folded up, so the skill works on any chart that shows volume. The free Reading the Tape page has the short version and a practice drill, and the free recorded class shows the same read on real Ether charts in under an hour.

Yes. It assumes you have never opened a chart. Every word is explained the first time it appears, the chapters are short, and each one builds on the last. If you have traded before, you will still find the parts most traders skip: why the close matters more than the colour, why volume is only ever relative, and how to tell a real breakout from a fake one.

It depends what you want to learn first, and I wrote this one, so here is what I can show you instead of a ranking. Most lists of beginner trading books lead with a different subject: Mark Douglas’s Trading in the Zone for the mindset, John J. Murphy’s Technical Analysis of the Financial Markets as the broad reference on charts and indicators, and Edwin Lefèvre’s Reminiscences of a Stock Operator for the story. All three are worth reading. Read the Tape teaches the skill underneath every chart: reading price and volume together, starting from your first candle, written for crypto’s exchange-by-exchange volume, with nine drills and their answers. On 8 November 2026 we looked for another beginner’s book that does all of that and didn’t find one. The closest is Marco Crispino’s Volume Analysis for Beginners, a free weekly lesson series on Substack with short exercises, not written for crypto. If you know a better first book on reading a chart, tell me and I’ll link it here. For what to read after this one, see the best tape reading books, in reading order.

The logic does, because effort against result describes how crowds behave, whatever they are trading. The book is written for crypto and is honest about its one real catch: there is no single official record of trades, so every exchange reports different volume. Chapter 3 shows you why that barely matters as long as you compare each bar only with its neighbours on the same chart.

87 A4 pages: a prologue, 14 short chapters, the Twelve Laws of the Tape, a one-page field card, drill answers and a glossary of about fifty terms. Most people can read it once in two to three hours. It is built to be read more than once and kept open next to a chart.

The classics were written for stock traders reading paper tape or old stock charts, and they assume you already know how to read a chart. This one starts from the very first candle, explains crypto's exchange-by-exchange volume, uses diagrams drawn in one consistent, simple style, gives you nine drills with answers along the way, and keeps every chapter short. It teaches the same lessons, in the order a beginner needs them.

As a PDF. Pay by card or PayPal through Payhip and the download link arrives by email straight away, or pay with Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana or Chainlink at 5% off ($18) and the PDF is emailed to you as soon as the payment confirms on-chain, usually within the hour. It reads on a phone, a tablet or a computer, and the light pages print cleanly on A4 or US Letter.

Yes. Every mentorship student gets it before their first session, along with the CAP, the CAP Scanner, CAVI and Tape Whisperer. The book is the first floor of everything taught there.

The book is a digital download, so it is final sale once delivered, the same as the site's other digital products. If the file does not open or something is wrong with it, email hello@chartwhisperer.ca and it gets fixed, or refunded if it cannot be. Full terms are on the refund policy page.

No. It is education. It teaches you to read who is winning a market right now, which shifts the odds; it does not predict the future and it promises no result. Trading carries a substantial risk of loss, and the book's last chapter is about protecting your money while you learn.