Learn the why. Not just the what.
Investing fundamentals, market logic, and the discipline behind good decisions.
Mental Accounting: Money Doesn't Know Its Origin
The tendency to treat money differently based on where it came from is one of the most consistently documented behavioural patterns in retail investing. Understanding the mechanism explains many specific portfolio errors.
When a Good Outcome Hides a Bad Decision
Outcome bias leads investors to judge decisions by results rather than process, reinforcing risky habits whenever luck happens to pay off.
Market Timing: What the Data Actually Shows
The empirical record of market timing efforts by retail and professional investors alike is unambiguous — most timing efforts underperform simple buy-and-hold strategies. Understanding the specific reasons is essential to any investor tempted by the practice.
Mean Reversion and Its Limits
Mean reversion — the tendency of extended moves to eventually retrace — is one of the most-discussed patterns in markets. Understanding when it applies and when it doesn't is essential to using the concept without being used by it.
The Closing Auction and Why It Moves Markets
A look at how closing auctions concentrate enormous volume into seconds, and why this mechanism quietly shapes the official price used across the financial system.
Candlestick Basics — Reading One Bar at a Time
Every candlestick bar contains four data points — open, high, low, close — and their relative positions describe the balance between buyers and sellers during that period. Reading a bar is a description, not a signal.
Parabolic SAR and the Cost of Chasing Trends
An examination of Parabolic SAR's trailing-stop logic, its strength in sustained trends, and why it struggles when markets lack direction.
The 2014-2016 Oil Crash
The oil price decline from $107 in June 2014 to $26 in February 2016 was one of the largest commodity price collapses in modern history. The mechanism was specific to a technology-driven supply shock that OPEC misread.
Prospect Theory: Utility Isn't Linear
Kahneman and Tversky's prospect theory formalised the specific ways human decision-making deviates from expected-utility theory. Understanding the shape of these deviations explains most of what looks like irrational investor behaviour.
Buy-and-Hold: The Underrated Discipline
Buy-and-hold is treated as a beginner strategy in most retail commentary. The empirical evidence suggests it consistently outperforms more active alternatives — not because it is sophisticated but because it avoids the mistakes active alternatives introduce.
The Aroon Indicator: Measuring Time, Not Price
The Aroon indicator tracks how recently price touched a new high or low, offering a time-based lens on trend age that momentum tools don't provide.
Correlation: The Thing That Breaks in Crises
Correlations between asset classes are often stable over long periods, then suddenly rise sharply during crises. Understanding the mechanism explains why 'diversified' portfolios often fail exactly when diversification is most needed.
The 1997 Asian Financial Crisis
How a currency peg break in Thailand cascaded into a regional crisis, revealing the hidden risks of currency mismatch and capital flow reversal.
Divergence: When Price and Momentum Disagree
Divergence between price and momentum indicators is one of the few technical patterns with meaningful empirical support. Reading it as description rather than as a decision rule is the difference between using it well and being used by it.
Risk Parity: Balancing Risk, Not Capital
An inside look at risk parity investing, a structural approach that allocates by volatility contribution rather than dollar amounts.
The 2010 Flash Crash: When Liquidity Vanishes
On May 6, 2010, the Dow lost nearly 1,000 points in minutes before recovering. The event exposed vulnerabilities in market structure that continue to influence how modern markets are regulated and monitored.
Ichimoku Cloud: Reading the Five Lines
A guide to what the Ichimoku Cloud actually measures, how its five components interact, and where the framework breaks down.
Overconfidence and Trading Frequency
Retail traders who trade frequently produce lower returns on average than those who trade rarely. The mechanism is overconfidence, and the relationship is one of the most consistently documented findings in retail investing.
The Railway Mania and the Cost of a Good Story
Britain's 1840s railway boom shows how a genuinely transformative technology can still produce speculative excess and lasting capital destruction.
Dollar-Cost Averaging: What It Solves, What It Doesn't
Dollar-cost averaging is one of the most-praised strategies in retail investing. The mathematics say something more nuanced — DCA solves a specific set of behavioural problems and produces a specific set of trade-offs.
Sector Rotation: The Pulse Beneath the Market
The sequential leadership of different sectors through economic cycles is one of the most reliable patterns in market behaviour. Reading rotation as it happens is one of the more useful analytical disciplines.
Low Volatility Investing: Calm as a Strategy
An overview of low volatility investing, the market anomaly behind it, its historical record, and the patience it demands from long-term investors.
Support and Resistance Are Zones, Not Lines
The precise horizontal line drawn on a chart is a visual convention. The actual behaviour of prices near notable levels is better described as a zone of reaction, not a single number.
Dark Pools and the Hidden Half of Trading
A look at how off-exchange trading venues shape price discovery and why a large share of daily volume never appears on a public order book.