I’ve been using technical analysis for years to make money in the stock market and have found it to be a key to my success. Most people just put money into the stock market without any plan on when they are going to buy a stock or sell a stock. But if you don’t know when you are going to take your profits then the market will take them from you.
You have to know how to do that yourself. The only way you are going to know when to sell is if you learn how the market trades and why individual stocks move the way they do. That means having an understanding of price action, which means technical analysis – the science and study of price action and charts.
Three principles guide the beliefs of technical analysis. First is that market action (price movements and changes in trading volume) discounts everything. In other words all of the relevant information about a company’s earnings and fundamentals are already known and incorporated into the price of its stock. Looking at a company’s balance sheet will rarely give you an edge over other investors. Everyone else knows that information too.
The second principle is that asset prices move in trends. Predictable trends are essential to the success of technical analysis, because they enable traders to profit by buying assets when the price is rising, or as the popular saying goes, “the trend is your friend.” Borrowing from Newton’s Law of motion, technical analysis asserts that trends in motion tend to remain in motion unless acted upon by another force.
The third principle is that history repeats itself. Traders and investors will react in the same way to the same conditions of the past, because the psychological motivations that drive them never change. This enables you to profit from patterns that repeat themselves in the stock market.
From these principles the technician attempts to identify trends in the market and reversals of trends. To distinguish trends from meaningless short-term fluctuations they use one of two types of analysis or a combination thereof: charting and mechanical trading systems. Chartists use graphs of stocks to identify meaningful patterns in the price and volume action of a stock.
The whole secret to investing is to get your emotions out of it as much as possible. Most people by because they fear missing out on more gains and sell when they let losses pile up and can’t take them anymore. You just need to make rules to let your winning positions run and cut your losing positions quickly so they won’t eat up your account balance.
It is all about learning and planning. You do those two things and you can make money in the stock market. Most investors don’t and that is why most investors don’t make a whole lot of money in the stock market or are just at average. You can do better if you just take action for yourself.
For more from Mike Swanson go to his stock trading blog at WallStreetWindow.com.