Technical Analysis
Support and resistance, trend, moving averages and indicators — what each computes and what it cannot know.
Part of the course
Technical Analysis
Support, resistance, trend and indicators — what each one is actually measuring, what it cannot tell you, and how to avoid the most common way people misuse them.
Support and Resistance
Support and resistance are zones where past participants transacted heavily enough to leave behind pending decisions. They describe where reactions have occurred — not where they must occur again.
8 min read
Trend and Moving Averages
A moving average is the mean of the last N closes, plotted forward. It smooths noise and it lags — those are the same property, not a benefit and a drawback.
8 min read
Indicators and Their Limits
Every indicator is a transformation of price and volume you already have. It adds no information — it only re-presents existing information in a form that is easier to read, and easier to over-read.
8 min read
Chart Patterns and What They Are Not
A chart pattern is a name given to a shape in past price. The name describes what already happened. It carries no probability about what happens next, and the statistics attached to patterns rarely survive contact with how they were collected.
8 min read
Volume and What It Confirms
Volume counts how much traded on one venue over one interval. It is a measure of participation, not of direction or conviction, and because it is venue-specific it cannot be compared across exchanges or summed into one honest number.
9 min read
Oscillators, Momentum and Divergence
An oscillator rescales recent price into a bounded number. "Overbought" is a statement about that scale, not about value, and divergence can persist for the entire length of a strong trend — both facts follow directly from how the calculation is built.
9 min read