Technical Analysis Guide: Lesson 1
- March 23rd, 2010
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The following topics are covered in this lesson:
1. Picking a trading style to reflect your personality
2. What is fundamental analysis? What is technical analysis?
3. Technical analysis 101: Support and resistance lines.
There are a million different ways to trade the financial markets. Maybe more. Swing traders, data players, Elliot Wave analysts, momentum traders, Gann theorists, spread traders, arbitrageurs – not to be confused with risk arbitrageurs – and correlation players all help to price and misprice assets. The music of the market reflects the instruments these traders use.
Yet any two traders using the same strategy could be taking wildly different trades – even taking opposites sides of the same trade. This is because, while sharing the same broad strokes, they could have different methods of analysis, different timeframes and different signals, leading to altogether different decisions.
Each mortal reflects his own personality in how he trades. No two traders, and therefore trading styles, are the same.
The choice of a trading strategy will depend in massive part on two factors: your free time and your personality. Some strategies are more time-consuming than others. Some require a greater appetite for risk. But when you have prefabricated the decision of what your trading strategy will be, it should still be continually tweaked to fit your comfort level – and to reflect your own strengths and weaknesses.
Two types of analysis
Do you want to take a long-term view and stick to it – or do you want to purchase and sell as the price moves up and down? Both of these strategies have strengths, and encapsulate the difference between the two main trading styles.
The smorgasbord of different strategies can loosely be separated into two categories: fundamental analysis and technical analysis.
Fundamental analysis thinks about the inherent financial health of a company, an economy or an industry.
In the stock market, you analyse company reports and pay careful attention to announcements and profit results; in the foreign exchange market, you watch data releases such as gross domestic product (GDP) growth, non-farms payrolls or interest rate releases; if you are buying an industry index or tracker you will look both at the individual companies within that industry and also macro factors (for instance, how are people in that industry affected by the price of oil?)
Technical analysis is based on the notion that prices move in trends – and that you can exploit these trends to make money.
You can either ignore the fundamental data entirely – as some brave chartists do – or you can absorb that data into your strategy, combining elements of both fundamental and technical analysis. The synthesis of the two styles is a strategy that many traders feel most comfortable with.
The technical analyst’s main tool is a price chart. By looking at this chart – seeing where the price has been before and seeing what happened when it got there – traders hope to predict where it will go next. The ideal way to learn technical analysis is by looking at a chart, so let’s have an example.
Next time on Spy School, Online trading guide: Technical analysis 101: Support and resistance lines.
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