StockCharts Insider: John Murphy’s Law #11 - Keep At It (The Hidden Curriculum of Technical Analysis)

Before We Dive In…

John Murphy’s unofficial Law #11 (“Keep at it”) can easily be misread as a motivational statement or a clichéd “self-help” line. But if you read it closely, it may be the most technical law of them all. How so? It doesn’t explain a tool, but rather, traces multiple paths showing how a person learns and develops technical expertise over time.

What Law #11 Is Not Saying

Murphy’s eleventh Law—”Keep at it”—seems so straightforward. 

If you think about the market, price seems straightforward. A chart pattern, like a symmetrical triangle or a head & shoulders, seems straightforward. 

None of it is.

So, interpret it how you wish, but as far as how I read it, this is what Law #11 is NOT saying:

• “Work harder” (doesn’t mean much)
• “Believe in yourself” (self-help cliché)
• “Don’t quit” (too vague)
• “Be disciplined” (that’s adjacent, but not the point)
• “Practice makes perfect” (too generic to be worth mentioning)

Instead, Law #11 reframes technical analysis not as a rulebook but as a dynamic body of knowledge built over time through experience.

Law #11 is a Meta-Law

Law #11 is outside the system, and its hidden message seems to be this: “If you treat the first ten laws as recipes instead of lenses that adapt to changing market conditions, they won’t work.”

So, what is this Law really saying? Here’s my take, in 7 Insider Tips.

Insider Tip #1: Pattern Recognition Is Non-Transferable Without Time-in-Market

You can’t learn technical analysis secondhand. You have to watch it unfold. Knowing how to respond to price action becomes easier once you’ve seen hundreds of failed breakouts, fakeouts, and regime shifts. 

It’s as if Murphy is saying: You don’t learn by knowing patterns and indicators. You learn by watching them fail and succeed numerous times. 

Book knowledge is inadequate without real pattern exposure. And backtests can’t substitute for screen time. So, take everything you’ve learned, tweak it, customize it, experiment with it, and repeat.

Insider Tip #2: Rules Work Better Once You’re Able to Sense When the Market is Going to Break Them

Murphy’s Laws are conditional, not absolute. Markets can unfold unpredictably, and sometimes you’ll need to adapt with real ingenuity to take advantage of the situation.  

Like a chess master, you have to know when to deploy a logical move or when to construct a more creative and unorthodox defense or attack.

With that in mind, “Keep at it” implies that expert judgment emerges after prolonged contradiction:

• When volume doesn’t confirm but price moves anyway.
• When ADX misclassifies a movement.
• When trend retracements go too far yet still reverse in the original direction.

Maybe other indicators you missed can explain what’s happening. Maybe fundamental factors, news-driven shocks, or macroeconomic or geopolitical developments are disrupting the chart pattern that looks too clean and obvious.

When a market doesn’t behave as technically forecasted, but you can still diagnose what’s actually happening, that’s when your skills truly start to level up. 

Insider Tip #3: Technical Analysis Is Adaptive, Not Static

Markets evolve, contexts shift, and indicators sometimes have to be reinterpreted. Basically, if no setup stays valid forever, then no indicator can retain its edge permanently. Over longer time spans, there is no point at which a trader finishes “learning” how charts behave.

You can see this adaptation play out across different time horizons.

Short term: Trading signals change as price behavior changes. Volatility expands or contracts, trends accelerate or stall, and indicators respond differently as conditions shift.

Long term: Structural changes in how markets trade can alter the behavior of entire strategies. The move toward nearly 24/5 U.S. index futures and online trading blurred traditional market opens and closes. As a result, classic “opening range” strategies—such as Toby Crabel’s Opening Range Breakout—often behave very differently today than they did when markets had clearly defined trading hours.

Trading in the post-Dot-com was very different from trading in the post-QE period. What will the AI-driven trading environment look like in the near future, and what will come after that?

In short, you may need to re-calibrate your technical analysis skills and re-tool every now and then. 

Insider Tip #4:  Experience Teaches What Indicators Can’t Encode

Some critical information never appears in formulas. 

The meaning behind the speed of price, the character of a pullback, the asymmetry of market reactions, the tone of volume, or the contradiction between two indicators of a similar class—all of these are qualitative layers that can never be quantified.

The main lesson here is twofold:

• Charts can teach you things that indicators can’t.
• Formulas can’t quantify the qualitative signals that are at times the most important ones to follow.

Insider Tip #5: Consistency Comes From Error Accumulation, Not Success

“Keep at it” doesn’t just mean “repeat what works,” it also means “catalog what fails.” 

Errors teach you not only when you should have applied a rule, but also when not to have applied a rule. It’s the classic “learn and unlearn” maxim. 

It also emphasizes how losing trades can help turn you into a better trader or chartist, but only if you learn from them. It’s like accumulating a library of errors that you know not to repeat the next time around.

Insider Tip #6: Technical Analysis Is a Craft, Not a Science

Murphy’s final Law subtly rejects the illusion of certainty. 

In short, tools matter, process matters, but skill emerges only through repetition under uncertainty. 

To “keep at it” means to always be a student. And “always be a student” means accepting irreducible ambiguity. Sometimes, you have to follow certain principles in a rigid manner, while other times, you’ll have to improvise, like a jazz soloist navigating changes in a harmonic context, or a DJ responding to shifts in the crowd’s vibe. Think “art,” not “rigid formula.”

Insider Tip #7: Law #11 Is Also a Warning Against Overconfidence

Murphy’s final Law says “you’re still not done.” Even if you’ve mastered the skills taught by all 10 Laws, the end point isn’t so much mastery as it is the humility to assume that perhaps there’s still much more to learn.

This guards against certain critical flaws, including…

• System worship: You believe a single system will work in every context despite evidence that it doesn’t.
• Indicator absolutism: It’s like how a “hammer”sees everything as a “nail,” so to speak.
• Guru syndrome: When you stop adapting and learning because you think you’ve figured everything out.

And That’s a Wrap

John Murphy’s Law #11 doesn’t add another indicator to your chart. It tells you that the tools and procedures you use are subject to change, both in the short-term and long-term. Technical analysis isn’t something you “finish” learning. Rather, your technical knowledge and skills deepen as you constantly engage in the uncertainties of the markets.

In that sense, “keep at it” isn’t encouragement. It’s a reminder that technical analysis is a dynamic discipline, and that it remains useful only as long as you’re willing to keep learning and to keep adapting to ever-evolving conditions underlying the market and economy.

That’s the hidden curriculum. And it never really ends.