Before We Dive In… Gold, silver, and Bitcoin are three entirely different assets. Gold’s a monetary metal. Silver’s a hybrid of monetary and industrial. Bitcoin’s a volatile crypto that somehow earned its street cred as digital gold. Yet they've lumped together under the “safe-haven”... READ MORE
Before We Dive In… Imagine giving a presentation on your blog or in a webinar where your SharpCharts pixelate the more you zoom in. You’ve put a lot of work into building a good chart. But on the big screen it looks like a blurry mix of jagged mush.... READ MORE
Before We Dive In… Do you know how many candlestick patterns are out there in the technical pattern universe? Just a little over 100. However, not every candlestick pattern has proven to be reliable or effective based on historical consistency. For this article, I want to zoom in on five... READ MORE
Before We Dive In… You’ve done your research. You’ve identified the instruments you want to trade. And now you’re ready to pull the trigger. At this point, you can easily jump the bridge between commitment and action. But the smartest way to go about it is to... READ MORE
Before We Dive In... Momentum stocks have been yielding outsized returns over the last few years. Recently, however, they started to unwind. The chip industry was one of its biggest drivers, according to Axios. When the Fed’s June rate decision was announced, investors got spooked. That’s a clean... READ MORE
Before We Dive In… In the last article, we covered the Trend part of the DecisionPoint Market Scoreboard. The scoreboard has four segments, and they’re meant to be read together. But each segment is already technically rigorous. If you’re new to it, you might find yourself confused. So,... READ MORE
Before We Dive In… You open your charts on a Monday morning, bad week behind you. And it turns out this one’s worse. Positions are under pressure, with one reversing badly. So you check the indicators. Trend says one thing; momentum says another. Volume’s no help this time.... READ MORE
Before We Dive In… The Performance Spread is a new indicator on StockCharts. It may not look like much at first. Compare a stock to a benchmark; line's up means it’s outperforming, line's down means it’s lagging. Too clean? Many people stop right there,... READ MORE
Before We Dive In… Nobody associates stock screeners with lost time, opportunity, and money. But a mishandled screener can deliver those as quickly as it can the opposite. StockCharts’ Screener is a powerful tool, but, if you steer it the wrong way, you’ll end up with either nothing, mismatched... READ MORE
Before We Dive In… Swing traders operate on relatively narrow time frames. They hold positions for days, maybe a week or more. If you’re looking for swing trading opportunities, fundamentals may be lower on the totem pole of criteria. You’re looking for technical setups, often from different angles.... READ MORE
Before We Dive In… StockCharts’ Screener is built for convenience and speed. Simple and straightforward. You’ve got a thesis. You stack indicators. Layers upon layers. You plug it in, results come in fast. You’re in discovery mode. But something’s missing. The presets don’t seem to match... READ MORE
Before We Dive In… Stock screen results are only as effective as the filter combinations you put in. Give it something basic, and basic is what you get back. Give it a combination that's unique, and you'll get a result that perhaps others miss. StockCharts'... READ MORE
Before We Dive In… There are times when you want to find tradable securities based on a simple premise. You want stocks or ETFs in certain groups exhibiting a few key technical and fundamental characteristics. What you don’t want to do in this early stage is to craft a... READ MORE
Before We Dive In… It’s easy to get too caught up in the present. Especially when it comes to investing. You’ve got news headlines, economic reports, current price moves, and just about everything to distract from what matters most: context. This is an exploitable blind spot, and not... READ MORE
Before We Dive In… Indicators are designed to help you perceive certain market dynamics more clearly. But first they have to consume data: Price. Volume. These are key ingredients. Extended hours trading changes the recipe. Volume vanishes. Thin trading distorts calculations. Momentum gets magnified. Trends look different. The math is... READ MORE
Before We Dive In… Gold has been all over mainstream financial news since 2020. Prior to that, it was a “barbarous relic.” Yesterday’s money. But then the world changed; inflation came back, debt got heavier, currencies looked shakier, geopolitics got uglier. Suddenly, gold became a “hot asset” again. Strange... READ MORE
Before We Dive In… There are plenty of tools on StockCharts for tracking emerging leaders. But only one enables you to find them quickly through color codes. Here’s a simple method: pair StockCharts Technical Rank (SCTR) with MarketCarpets. Now you can identify stocks that are rotating from average performance... READ MORE
Before We Dive In… You spot a clear market pattern. Maybe it’s a smooth upswing and pullback. Maybe it’s a symmetrical triangle, or a rectangle pattern. It’s ideal for a swing trade. You jump in. But once your position’s open, how far can it go? Where’... READ MORE
Before We Dive In… There’s a lesser-known group of indicators most traders have never heard of. Around 122 of them. They track opportunities and risks in ways that most others don’t. And they do it in binary. Yes or no. On or off. There’s no in-... READ MORE
Before We Dive In… You see that volume histogram beneath your chart? It holds a lot of insight. Perhaps more than you realize. But not in its default position. First, you have to rotate it. Turn it into a Volume-by-Price indicator. This gives it range across the x... READ MORE
Before We Dive In… Swing charting is one of the models featured in ChartSchool’s Trading Strategies & Models page. It’s a simple concept. But its simplicity is comparable to the bare foundations of an elaborate building. No matter how detailed and ornate a structure, if the foundation is... READ MORE
Before We Dive In… You invested a lot of money into a bad stock, and you realized it too late. It plunged, and you've taken a huge loss. So, later, you buy a sizable position in a much stronger company. It pulls back, as all stocks do. You... READ MORE
Before We Dive In… Whether you trade for the short-term or long-term, the first thing you probably do every morning is check the headlines: CNBC, Bloomberg, Fox Business, or whatever suits you. We all do this, because markets react to information. And we don't want to... READ MORE
Before We Dive In… Sectors show the market’s inner rumblings. Money flows in. Money pulls out. Pressure builds beneath the surface. Sectors, and the opportunities they present, are never static. Some opportunities are obvious. Others stay buried in the noise. Following sectors can give you an advantage; if you... READ MORE
Before We Dive In… We’re in the early stages of an era defined by artificial intelligence (AI). And while people on the extreme polar ends might characterize AI as either panacea or doom, what we do know, on a more practical level, is that AI is an extraordinarily effective... READ MORE
Before We Dive In… Many traders spend too much time flipping through charts to find the right setup. Sometimes, they’ll find something that looks good, while other times, they get a bunch of duds. But what if that process was backwards? Instead of searching for stocks, what if you... READ MORE
Before We Dive In… You want to achieve brilliance? Answers aren’t the best measure. But generating great questions is, at least according to ancient wisdom. This distinction is especially relevant when you’re working with an AI-driven chatbot. The difference between getting the “same old, same old” and... READ MORE
Before We Dive In… We already covered Market Summary basics in a previous article. So, in this installment, we’re going to talk about creating an ecosystem—wiring together all of the parts to make an even more powerful and customizable tool for your workflow. We can also make this... READ MORE
Before We Dive In… Many traders who think they have a charting problem actually have more of an attention problem, or even a timing problem. You can have the best chart and indicator setup, but if you still have to check your charts intermittently, you’re operating on a delay.... READ MORE
Before We Dive In… When you buy a home, you don’t just look at the price and the staged pictures. You check everything from the neighborhood down to the foundation. Yet even though you wouldn’t evaluate a house from just one angle, traders often do exactly that with... READ MORE
Before We Dive In… StockCharts has two main chart platforms, each powerful in their own right. But what does one do better than the other? What kind of trader or investor is either designed for? Which one better matches your needs? Though both chart the same markets, comparing the two... READ MORE
Before We Dive In… Many traders think “edge” comes from methods and indicators. It doesn’t. Edge comes from structure. Structure aligns your scale of observation with your knowledge, tools, and processes. When those elements work together, dynamically and in combination, that’s where edge emerges. If your workspace is... READ MORE
Before We Dive In… In a previous article, we went over “smart money” positioning in the market. Now, let’s talk about your fellow retail investors. How are they feeling about the market, and what difference would it make if you were able to track their overall sentiment on a... READ MORE
Before We Dive In… Many traders pay attention to only two signals when using the Relative Strength Index (RSI): overbought and oversold. The problem is if you do it that way, you’re focusing on minor clues while missing the bigger picture. Here’s something you might not know: you... READ MORE
Before We Dive In… What if you could see how active money managers are actually positioned—not what they’re saying, but what they’re actually doing with real capital? At times, there can be a big gap between the two. There is a way to track that positioning. It... READ MORE
Before We Dive In… You’re looking at two stocks. Both seem promising. Both are starting to move. But which one do you trade? Spend five minutes on social media forums and you’ll see this question pop up everywhere. Many traders choose based on the story, the brand, or... READ MORE
Before We Dive In… Last time, I showed how an index can keep climbing even as fewer stocks do the work; rallies that look strong but may already be weakening underneath. The Bullish Percent Index (BPI) measures how many stocks in an index are flashing Point & Figure buy signals.... READ MORE
Before We Dive In… Scroll through YouTube or TikTok and you’ll find that trading looks easy. Clean charts, fast profits, flashy lifestyles…it’s everywhere! Even my 12-year-old son, after a few weeks of studying candlestick patterns (without telling me), has become an “expert” who asked if... READ MORE
Before We Dive In… When the S&P 500 makes a 1% move up, it feels like the market is exhibiting strength. But is it? Sometimes an index will rise because a handful of mega-caps are doing the heavy lifting. What you don’t see are the other... READ MORE
Before We Dive In… In our last breadth article, we explored how Point & Figure buy signals give a unique angle on index strength or weakness. Today, we’re going to widen our breadth lens across four time horizons, which will give us clues on strength from periods of short-... READ MORE