New Forex Trading Strategy

Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Knowing When to Buy and Sell a Stock

By Michael Swanson

I'm sure you have your own method to picking out what stocks you like to buy. You might be a value investor who buys based on fundamentals. Or you may be a growth investor who looks for companies that have big earnings growth. Whatever type of stock you buy you need a method to know when to buy and sell.

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.

There are three key things you need to know when it comes to charts and technical analysis. First you must understand that the price of a stock is already factoring in the future. A stock is high because people think the future is good and low when they think it is bad. So if you want to make money based on that you are trying to outsmart the entire world.

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.

The important thing is to be able to tell when a price movement represents an important pattern or is just noise you need to ignore. To do that you just need to do some studying and learn the patterns. Most people don't do that and just chase fluctuations and lose money.

This requires a degree of skill, judgment, and interpretation. Mechanical trading systems attempt to do away with subjectivity by basing investment decisions on mathematical indicators calculated with the variables of price and volume.

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. - 23305

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