Technical analysis — field reference
Pre-Trade Notes
A plain-language reference for reading a stock chart — what every mark on it is called, what the settings do, and what the evidence behind each one actually is.
Read this part first
This is a reference, not a method, and it is not financial advice. Nothing on it predicts a price, and none of it is a recommendation to buy, sell or hold anything.
It is also worth knowing what the research says about the activity all of this vocabulary serves. Of everyone who day traded Brazilian equity futures for more than 300 days, 97% lost money. Across fifteen years of the Taiwan Stock Exchange, under 1% of day traders were reliably profitable after costs. At a US discount broker the most active fifth of households earned 11.4% a year against a market that returned 17.9%. Those are populations, not anecdotes, and they are cited in full on the first page below.
Every entry here carries a tag saying what kind of evidence sits behind it: defined for arithmetic that cannot be wrong, studied for claims that have been tested in peer-reviewed work, and untested for the ones that are widely taught with no published test behind them. The count as it stands is 33 defined, 56 studied, 87 untested — which is the honest shape of this subject, and the reason the tags are on the cards instead of in a footnote.
Start here
The measured outcomes, the arithmetic, and a way to check what stuck. Three pages, and the only ones with anything provable in them.Base rates
5What actually happened to the people who did this, measured.
The math
3The three calculations that decide more outcomes than any indicator.
Check yourself
10Ten questions. Scored here, stored nowhere.
Reading a chart
What the marks on the screen are: a single candle, the shapes a few of them make, the larger figures a price line draws, and the statistics beside the quote.Reading a candle
6What the body and the wicks of a single candle are telling you.
Candle patterns
26One to five candles: bullish, bearish, and the shapes that say wait.
Chart shapes
25The larger figures a price line draws — W, M, cup, wedge, flag.
Key statistics
10Company size, valuation, trading activity, and the cost of shorting.
Reference appendix
Ninety-one indicators and eighteen Smart Money concepts, each with its own page. This is a dictionary — use it to look things up, not as a reading order.Smart Money Concepts
18Liquidity, structure, fair value gaps and order blocks — the ICT framework.
Moving averages
10Ways of smoothing price into one trend line, and what each period does.
Trend & direction
17Which way the trend points, how strong it is, and where it may turn.
Bands & channels
10Envelopes around price marking the normal range and the breakout.
Momentum & oscillators
25Speed and strength of a move — overbought, oversold, divergence.
Volume & money flow
17Whether a price move has real participation behind it.
Volatility & statistics
12How much price moves, and the statistics underneath the rest.