If you’re a technical trader, almost every study or indicator you use is based on price or volume data. Price always seems to get the attention because it directly affects portfolio values, but understanding how to interpret volume is a skill that can benefit traders in the long run. Simply put, volume is the number […]

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Baron Rothschild, a member of the famous French banking family, is famous for saying “The time to buy is when there’s blood in the streets.” But that may be easier said than done without a sound methodology to determine which stocks have suffered a mere flesh wound, and which have taken a mortal blow. There […]

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Investors often hear that one stock is “overbought,” or another is “oversold.” How do experts arrive at those conclusions, and how can investors learn to do their own analysis of a stock’s valuation? There’s the price-to-earnings ratio (P/E), price/earnings to growth ratio (PEG), and price to book value, among others. These ratios and values help form […]

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Support and resistance are two of the most important concepts in technical analysis. How can investors potentially gain insight by applying support and resistance? One simple way to think about support and resistance is by imagining a floor and ceiling for stock prices. Imagine spiking a bouncy rubber ball on the floor. What happens when […]

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Some traders who use technical analysis can fall prey to the idea that profitability comes only from teasing and torturing indicators. And some may do it to such an extent that the indicators no longer retain their logic and can lose some effectiveness. But when it comes to identifying opportunities in the stock market, sometimes […]

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Bollinger Bands are one of the more widely used technical indicators because they are relatively simple to understand and intuitive to apply. Among other applications, some traders apply Bollinger Bands to measure overbought or oversold conditions in stocks, indexes, futures, forex, and other markets. In this article, we’ll take a look at applying Bollinger Band […]

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The jobs report released last week was okay, but not enough to supercharge expectations that the Fed would hike interest rates during its September 21 meeting. For the S&P 500, this might mean more of the same: sideways trading, within a well-defined range.  The longer-term trend in U.S. stocks, however, remains bullish, evidenced by the […]

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There are a number of well-known sayings related to stock market trends. For example: “the trend is your friend,” or “don’t fight the trend.” They help traders remember to trade with, not against, the prevailing trend. But some traders only follow the trend in order to trade against it. They’re called contrarians, and although their […]

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Are you a head-and-shoulders, pennant and channel person, or do you prefer the doji, shooting star and Harami? In other words, when studying charts, do you follow traditional technical analysis and bar charts, or do you prefer candlestick charting? If you are looking for some extra illumination in your trading and investing, candlesticks may be […]

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It’s important to identify general trends, but technicians seek to understand why trends happen, or the investor behavior that creates trends. Technicians use the concepts of supply and demand to explain why trends occur and how human behavior shapes stock prices. Supply is the number of shares available for purchase at a certain price. Demand […]

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