Learn the why. Not just the what.
Investing fundamentals, market logic, and the discipline behind good decisions.
Supply and Demand as the Only Real Law
Beneath every indicator, pattern, and theory lies a single irreducible truth: price is set by the balance between those who wish to buy and those who wish to sell. Everything else is commentary on this.
Market Breadth and the Health of a Rally
A rising index can conceal a deteriorating market. Breadth measures how many stocks are actually participating, revealing whether an advance rests on broad strength or a narrow and fragile few.
Risk-On, Risk-Off: The Market's Two Moods
Markets swing between two collective moods: an appetite for risk and a flight from it. Recognising which mood prevails explains why unrelated assets so often move together, against all logic of their fundamentals.
The Bond–Equity Relationship
Stocks and bonds are often treated as separate worlds, but they are two halves of a single conversation about risk, return, and the price of money. Reading them together reveals what neither shows alone.
How Interest Rates Reprice Everything
Interest rates are not merely one factor among many. They are the gravitational constant of finance, the rate against which every asset is valued, and when they move, they reprice the entire financial universe.
Liquidity Is the Tide That Moves All Boats
Beneath the analysis of individual assets runs a deeper force that affects everything at once: the availability of money itself. Liquidity is the tide, and when it rises or falls, it moves all boats together.
Market Cycles: Why the Pattern Repeats
Markets move in cycles of expansion and contraction that repeat across generations. The patterns recur not because history is fixed but because the human nature that drives them never changes.
Sector Rotation and the Flow of Capital
Capital does not sit still. It flows between sectors in response to the economic cycle, and understanding where it tends to move, and why, reveals a logic beneath movements that otherwise seem random.
The Limits of Technical Analysis
Having spent thirty essays examining the tools of technical analysis, honesty demands a clear account of what these tools cannot do. Knowing the limits is what separates a disciplined practitioner from a true believer.
Building a Two-Indicator Confirmation System
Every single indicator eventually fails, and that failure naturally points toward combining tools. But combine them carelessly and you just multiply the confusion, so the path between…
Elliott Wave Theory Without the Mysticism
Elliott Wave Theory sits in a strange spot in market analysis -- it draws fierce loyalty from its believers and just as fierce dismissal from its critics, often for the same underlying…
Dow Theory: The Foundation Beneath Modern Charts
Nearly everything in modern technical analysis traces back, whether its users realize it or not, to a body of ideas assembled more than a hundred years ago under the name Dow Theory…
OBV and the Logic of Accumulation
On-Balance Volume tracks the flow of volume into and out of an asset, attempting to reveal whether the smart money is quietly accumulating or distributing beneath the surface of price.
Timeframes: The Same Indicator, Different Truths
The same indicator can flash a buy on one timeframe and a sell on another, and both can be correct. Understanding how timeframes relate is the difference between confusion and clarity.
Why Indicators Fail in Sideways Markets
Most indicators are quietly designed for trending markets and break down when the market goes flat. Understanding why is the key to knowing when to trust any tool at all.
Fibonacci Retracements: Tool or Superstition?
No tool in technical analysis splits opinion quite like the Fibonacci retracement. The method takes a significant price swing and draws a set of horizontal lines across it at ratios…
The Difference Between a Signal and Noise
Every chart contains far more movement than meaning. The central skill of technical analysis is not finding signals but learning to discard the overwhelming quantity of noise that surrounds them.
Pivot Points and Intraday Structure
Pivot points translate yesterday's range into today's map of likely turning levels. They are mechanical, objective, and widely watched, which is both their strength and the reason they should be read with care.
Gaps: What an Empty Space on the Chart Means
A gap is a place where price jumped, leaving a void where no trading occurred. That emptiness is not a flaw in the chart but a record of a moment when the market's opinion changed abruptly.
Combining Momentum and Trend Indicators
Start from an observation that's almost too simple to seem important: the two major families of technical tools break down in exactly opposite conditions. Trend-following indicators…
Histogram Reading: The Underrated Half of MACD
Most users of MACD watch the crossover and ignore the histogram beneath it. Yet the histogram often speaks first, describing the momentum of momentum that the crossover only confirms much later.
The Problem with Over-Optimising Indicators
The search for the perfect indicator settings feels like diligence, but it usually produces the opposite of what it promises. A strategy tuned to fit the past is often a strategy designed to fail in the future.
Moving Average Ribbons and Trend Strength
A single moving average shows direction. A ribbon of many averages shows something a single line cannot: the strength, order, and health of a trend, read at a glance through the spacing between them.
The Golden Cross and Death Cross in Context
Few technical events attract as much attention as the golden cross and the death cross. The names are dramatic; the reality is a lagging signal that means far less in isolation than the headlines suggest.