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About Dean Cross
Dean Cross has been trading the markets since the 1990s, long before zero-commission brokers and YouTube tutorials made the learning curve look shorter than it is. What he knows, he learned with real money on the line: real trades, real losses, and three decades of watching what actually works once the textbook example is over.
His books rest on a plain philosophy: understand what you're doing before you do it, manage your risk before you manage your profits, and never let the market teach you a lesson you could have learned from a book.
Dean doesn't write to impress you with complexity or tempt you with easy money. Every title gives the honest, complete picture: what a tool or strategy does well, where it breaks down, and when to walk away. If an indicator has limits, he names them. If a strategy carries a risk most books skip, you'll find it spelled out.
His catalog covers six areas.
Reading the Chart teaches price charts from the ground up (candlesticks, support and resistance, trendlines, chart patterns, volume, market structure, and gaps) and does something most charting books never do: it tests the rules. Each book checks the classic claims against more than twenty years of US stock data, so you learn not just what a pattern is supposed to mean but how often it actually does.
The Technical Indicator Series takes on the tools traders lean on most, including moving averages, MACD, VWAP, RSI, the TTM Squeeze, and Fibonacci retracements. It treats each one as it really is: useful, limited, and costly when misread. Each book spends as much time on how and why an indicator fails as on how it works, because the failures are where the money goes.
The Options Strategy Series takes one strategy at a time and takes it to the ground. Assigned, Called Away and Hedged are written for the investor who would rather understand a single mechanism completely than collect a dozen he half understands. Each names the catch as plainly as the reward.
The Retirement Income Series tackles the problem everything else ultimately serves: turning a finished nest egg into income that lasts. Harvested takes the options route, with covered calls and cash-secured puts run conservatively inside an IRA or Roth. Built takes the ownership route, with dividend-paying businesses chosen on whether the company can actually afford to keep paying. Weathered follows dividend income through three decades of crashes, rate shocks and inflation. The mechanisms differ, but the question is the same: where does a monthly paycheck come from once the paychecks stop, and what makes it hold?
The Investing Strategy Series takes the rules investors are handed and tests them on the whole record, including the companies that cut, collapsed or failed. Pick Dividend Stocks That Keep Paying tests the dividend rules on every stock in the S&P 500 since 1990, and Crashes, Recessions and Recoveries tests 34 popular beliefs about market cycles on 155 years of stock market returns.
The Trading Strategy Series tests the trading rules everyone repeats, one at a time, and gives each a plain verdict. The Seasonal Stock Market Handbook covers the calendar rules, and The Day Trading Rules Handbook covers the rules of the trading day.
Across all six, risk management isn't a chapter. It's the foundation. Before anything else, Dean asks the same question: what can go wrong, and how do you protect yourself when it does?
He started writing to fill a gap he kept running into. Market books were too full of hype, too shallow to be useful, or too complex to be readable, and almost never gave the complete picture. He writes for the self-directed investor who has worked a lifetime to build something and has no interest in losing it to a strategy they didn't fully understand.
He believes the best trading book is the one that tells you when not to make the trade.