I rarely post on HC now days in part because i am busy and part...

I rarely post on HC now days in part because i am busy and part because people use it as a forum to argue with each other rather than write about stocks.

I have followed Len for some time on several stocks. I credit him with causing me to change my mind about charts and read some books that hard core fundamental finance people (like me) would never open.

Lens posts are worth reading. Not considering his views has cost me money and listening and adding my own research has been helpful although I still don't see everything that he sees.

My experience has been that the charts ( and I am still on training wheels) are remarkably predictive. Indeed given that plenty of trading banks, brokers and hedge funds retain technical analysts, you have to imagine they have some success.

Support and resistance are real and they have a basis in human behaviour.

When volume trades at a particular price for a period of time, it embeds a price in the market where the stock gets stuck. No trader wants to be the one that pays the highest price. Once it breaks out, greed tells them they are missing out and must jump on accelerating the move.

On the way down, stocks stick at congestion points because the people that bought there resist selling and acknowledging they were incorrect. when the price breaks below a resistance level it triggers stop losses because people that bought there don't want to lose more.

In order to really understand charts, I think about how you feel about price movements as a holder and as a potential buyer when price targets are hit. These feelings are manifested in the behaviour of hundreds of traders giving life to technical theories. The patterns are an expression of what market participants are feeling and expressing in trading decisions. Some of the books actually associate certain candles with how the collective market was feeling when it was creating that pattern.

I don't like technicals on NDO because the trade lacks depth. This does not mean that it does not deserve attention.

Breaks below key resistance levels are bad. In particular when the management is sub optimal disclosers. Traders are more likely to sell the pattern based on past bad experience with management and negative announcements associated with delaying news beyond promised dates. Managers do not delay good news.

Oh and Len is not a ramper.

The best posters on HC bring skill and information to the forum. Len is one of them.