oh dear. i can't imagine you failing at any academic subject. ah well... maybe it's time for you to take a break from academics anyway. *hugs*

Oh. I "failed" three subjects in the Graduate Certificate in Professional Accounting which is now the "early" stage of the Master of Commerce Degree in which I graduated last year. "Technical Analysis" was covered in the Master of Commerce Degree but it isn't considered either scientific or academic so not much time was spent on it.

I probably lost marks for assuming the hypothetical investor was "short" in the stock and based my recommendations on that. I noted at the last minute that the hypothetical investor was "long" in the stock but only had two minutes to "correct" myself asserting that my advice to "stay long" was just as valid as my advice to "stay short" as the stock was in a trading range and it was hard to discern which direction the stock might move.

I believe examiners like the students to "read the question".

There's no great loss. I am a Senior Associate of FINSIA anyway (based on the Master's Degree) and they are divesting themselves of their educational arm to an American educational company.

The course materials need some sprucing up. Study is based entirely on their course materials rather than text books.

Yeah. Time to relax methinks. I've satisfied the National Institute of Accountants requirements for continuing professional education.

It's an option to take individual subjects without enrolling in an award such as a Graduate Certificate or Graduate Diploma. Commitment to study is also off putting to some potential employers.

Despite failing I now understand the basic terminology and can read and understand "Technical Analysis" terminology better than I could before I started and probably better than study from any available "general investor" book of which there are many.

I was thinking perhaps of taking short courses in subjects such as SQL (computer studies) as this is a lot more practical and more pertinent to the type of work I am likely to be offered in the market place.

Around 1994 I joined the Australian Computer Society by taking the examinations the Society ran at that time. One of the subjects was "Programming Principles" and a potential applicant for membership of the Society had to prove their generic programming ability by coding problems in a computer language of their choice. I chose Pascal as I was familiar with it at that time. I had to code a sort routine ( a simple bubble sort was sufficient ), demonstrate the ability to manipulate a stack and to do some simple cyclical redundancy checks. Pascal is out of favour at the moment and probably well into the future. I once programmed my Amiga in Modula2 which is/was a superset of Pascal.

An applicant also had to prove familiarity with SQL as part of the compulsory subject "Relational Database Design" although it wasn't necessary to do much more than extract data from a relational database. Things have "moved on" since 1994 however. The Society now runs a diploma course and a student is obliged to program in Java (object oriented) rather than a language of their choice. The ACS website has detail of the current course they run.

I have done a short course in Java and have a certificate to prove it but I couldn't pass myself off as a Java programmer on the basis of that. I've learned to program in a number languages including C and have "played around" with other languages including FORTH (which I liked) and LISP ("Lots of Infernal Stupid Parentheses") which is seemingly used in AI.

As for the net framework I today downloaded (the free to anyone) SQL Server Express from Microsoft which uses the net framework and updated my database of stock prices in FCharts Pro. I better understand the charting functions built into that program as a result of studying Technical Analysis. It tells me that the local stockmarket "crash" in late February more than corrected itself.

As a subject "Technical Analysis" has almost no market value whereas SQL does but I'm a bit behind the "eight ball" on that.

I have skills but many of them are generic and obscure and out of date in today's market place although it sometimes happens that "out of date" skills are still useful and people boned up a "up to date" stuff are out of touch with quite simple concepts that can save them heaps of effort.

plod on.. plod on... :-)