Technical analysis / field reference Pre-Trade Notes
Not advice Educational reference only — nothing here predicts a price. What the measured outcomes are · Sources

Reading a chart

Key statistics

The figures in a stock's quote summary — company size, valuation, how actively it trades, and what it costs to short. These describe the security itself rather than reading its chart.

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Every figure on this page is a definition: it reports something that has already been measured and makes no claim about what comes next. The arithmetic that connects them — what a percentage loss costs to undo — now has its own page under The math.

How these fit together

These figures describe the company and how tradable its stock is, and each one only means something next to the others. Market cap and the P/E ratio together say what the market is paying for the business relative to what it earns. Volume against average volume says whether today is ordinary. The 52-week range places today's price inside the year's story. And short inventory read with the borrow rate describes how expensive it currently is to bet against the stock — which is the setup behind every short squeeze.

  • Share price ÷ earnings per share = P/E — same earnings with a bigger market cap means a higher P/E
  • Volume > 2× average volume → something happened today; the price move carries more weight
  • Price near the 52-week high on heavy volume → breakout conditions; near the low → breakdown
  • Dividend yield shown as — → the company reinvests its profits instead of paying them out
  • Scarce short inventory + high borrow rate → a crowded short side, where squeezes start

Market cap

Mkt Capdefined

Market capitalization — the total value of all a company's outstanding shares, calculated as share price times number of shares. A quick measure of how big the company is.

Price-earnings ratio

P/Edefined

The share price divided by earnings per share. It shows how much investors are paying for each dollar of the company's profit; a higher P/E often signals investors expect more future growth.

Dividend yield

Div. Yielddefined

Annual dividend payments per share divided by the share price, expressed as a percentage — the return you'd earn from dividends alone. A dash instead of a number means the stock currently pays no dividend.

Average volume

Avg Voldefined

The typical number of shares traded per day. The averaging window depends on the platform — Robinhood averages the past year, while most quote pages show a three-month figure — so compare like with like.

Volume (today)

Vol (today)defined

The total number of shares traded so far in the current session. Compare it to average volume to see whether today's activity is unusually heavy or light.

Open price

Opendefined

The price at which the stock first traded when the market opened today.

High today / Low today

H / Ldefined

The highest and lowest prices the stock has traded at during the current session — the day's range.

52 week high / 52 week low

52W H / Ldefined

The highest and lowest prices the stock has traded at over the past year, giving context for where today's price sits in its longer-term range.

Short inventory

Short Inv.defined

Whether shares are currently available to borrow for short selling. “Available” means brokers have shares on hand to lend out; scarce inventory makes shorting harder and more expensive.

Borrow rate

Borrowdefined

The annualized fee charged to borrow shares in order to short the stock. Near 0% means borrowing is cheap and easy; a high rate signals heavy demand to short and scarce supply.

How to read the evidence tag

Every entry here carries one of three tags. The tag rates the evidence behind the claim the entry makes — not how popular the tool is, how old it is, or how confident the people teaching it sound. Close to half of the entries on this site sit on the weakest tier — including every one of the eighteen Smart Money Concepts, which are drawn here in the same ink as Wilder’s ADX and deserve to be told apart from it. That is the honest position rather than an oversight.

  • defined33 entries

    True by arithmetic. This entry describes a calculation or a piece of terminology, and makes no claim about what price will do next. Nothing here can be wrong except a typo.

  • studied56 entries

    The predictive claim attached to this entry has been tested in peer-reviewed research. Being on this tier does not mean it works — across the literature these edges are typically small, unstable between markets and periods, and often gone after costs.

  • untested87 entries

    Widely taught and widely believed, but no published test of the claim was located while building this page. Treat it as a description of what traders do, not as evidence that doing it pays.

The line between studied and untested is drawn by whether a peer-reviewed test of the specific claim could be found, and those tests are listed on the Sources page under “Evidence and base rates”. If you know of a published test of something tagged untested, the tag is wrong and should change — that is the point of labelling it at all.