Trading Tips

Volatility is every stock trader’s best friend. As long as stocks are moving in one direction or another — or both! — there is the potential to profit. It’s when stocks are standing still that traders get killed. There are ways to make money in sideways markets — such as writing options contracts — but [...]

Moving Averages are useful for filtering out noise and visualizing a stock’s true trend. The 10-, 30-, 50-, and 200-day moving averages also tend to act like support and resistance, too, so it’s always smart to have at least one of them as an overlay on all of your charts.
But how about more than one [...]

Ever notice how most technical indicators and statistics were invented in the 60s, 70s, and 80s? I think it’s because traders who wanted an edge had to do the dirty work, crunching numbers and coming up with new models. Today, we can just go online and find everything we need to about a stock: it’s [...]

There are no “get-rich-quick” schemes in stock trading, no matter what anyone tries to sell you. In order to make it, you have to do your research, learn, make mistakes, learn from those mistakes, and continually build on your knowledge.
Similarly, there’s no way to “learn it all” about stock trading in one day, one month, [...]

“Shooting star.” This chart formation has a fancy name, but it’s not at all complex. In fact, it is a single-candlestick formation. Best of all, it is an incredibly reliable predictor of a bearish reversal.
Shooting stars are pretty easy to spot — if you know what you’re looking for. There are a bunch of criteria [...]

This is the 52nd episode of TradingTips.com’s Trading Tip of the Week. Over the past year, we’ve looked at dozens of technical indicators, most of which are explicitly intended to be used in conjuction with one or more other technical indicators for increased reliability.
But when you start cross-referencing models, you almost always end up [...]

Reading stock charts isn’t always as easy as A, B, C. In fact, a lot of times it’s more like trying to decode some ancient language in a foreign script. That’s because, as with many dead languages, CONTEXT is paramount — and that’s especially true when comparing hanging men and hammers.
Hanging men and hammers are [...]

The recent stock-market crash caught most traders by surprise. True enough, many fundamental analysts and economists have long-been warning about the market being overdue for a correction, but none of them could say exactly when it was going to happen. Well, all of the eggheads were outsmarted by a simple technical indicator — the PPO, [...]

People think candlesticks are simple, and they’re right. But just like a good card game, candlesticks take a minute to learn and a lifetime to master. It’s truly amazing how much information is contained in such a small package.
In this episode, we look at “engulfing lines,” which are yet another very strong candlestick indicator. But [...]

Babe Ruth hit 714 home runs without steroids or modern training methods. NASA put men on the moon in 1969, when computers were the size of auditoriums. And heck, we still don’t really know how the Egyptians built the pyramids.
The point of all this is that sometimes “old fashioned” ways of doing things are [...]