The following popped up into my email this afternoon.

The inability to read a tape and spot trends is also why so many in the relative-value space who rely solely on fundamentals have been annihilated in the past decade. Markets have consistently experienced "100-year events" every five years. While I spend an inordinate amount of my time on analytics and collecting fundamental information, at the end of the day, I am a slave to the tape and proud of it....... While I'm a staunch advocate of higher education, there is no training - classroom or otherwise - that can prepare for trading the last third of a move, whether it's the end of a bull market or the end of a bear market. There's typically no logic to it; irrationality reigns supreme, and no class can teach what to do during that brief, volatile reign. The only way to learn how to trade during that last, exquisite third of a move is to do it, or, more precisely, live it - a sort of baptism by fire. One has to experience both the elation and fear as markets move five and six standard deviations from conventional definitions of value.

- Paul Tudor Jones

I came into this business as a hard-core fundamental value guy with a disdain for charts.  I still believe that in the end, what matters is fundamentals, economics and valuation.  However, over the years, I have come to strongly believe that an ability to read charts is an invaluable tool that can greatly add to the bottom line.  The fact that so many professionals are dismissive of chart-reading makes the task all the more useful.