Timing Your Stock Trades

I’ve been using technical analysis for years to make money in the stock market through stock trading 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.

One other thing you need to know is that prices move in patterns. There are patterns you can find in a stock that will tell you where it is likely to go in the future so you don’t need to outsmart the whole world to make money. You just have to identify the patterns that are important and understand them.

The reason why technical analysis works is because investors will never change. Throughout history they have been driven by fear and greed and always will be. There always will be people who buy at tops and sell at bottoms and you just need to know the patterns that show you when important turning points are at hand.

The key is to distinguish important trends from meaningless short-term fluctuations in the stock market. That is why you want to combine some sort of fundamental analysis with technical analysis. You want to use price charts as a tool.

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.

Money doesn’t fall from the sky. Making money in the stock market requires guts, grits, and tough work. You need to educate yourself on technical analysis in order to use stock charts and make money off of price action in the stock market.

For more from Mike Swanson go get his technical analysis newsletter.