S&P/ASX Small Ordinaries (ASX:XSO) - The Brains Trust - 2021, page-2521 - HotCopper | ASX Share Prices, Stock Market & Share Trading Forum

Originally posted by cha: ↑

Hi Dave
good on you.
There are heaps of modern materials which align with modern charting software . I am sure they are great but if you like to dig deeper then you may find
The Book "Fibonacci and Gann Applications in Financial Markets" by MacLean interesting. It struck a chord with me anyway and points out the problems with retail using vanilla software charting. I dont think you need to read it but up to you. i just find a lot of charts don't communicate the real story. The CFDs and trading houses advocate stops and seem to have a clearout every so often of the stops so all the funds end up with them. pure evil in my eye anyway.
The usual charting books include the VSA method in the book "The Undeclared Secrets That Drive the Stock Market"? by T Williams
also there are lots out there on the world of speed angles, swing-high swing -low spikes, darvis breaks and fib levels.......
but i expect you are on top of them anyway.
i find the breaks on the daily then weekly and finally the monthly charts have worked well post gfc which combined with fib levels and the hammer helped provide a framework and a great background for the speed angles. now we are in the mopping up where it is a new background.
i find the midcaps are the best ones for following the fib levels almost to the cent.
WHC and midcaps
you and I posted on this run of WHC. it has now doubled, retraced and almost doubled again. the way it tackles each level will help decide whether to buy more. hold or sell. @gypaetus i think is also onto it as well. what is wrong with a method that works and doubles your money. i posted on the first move of whc from the break up from 60c to $5. each step until i realised i was alone. it is good to have some company in the midcaps
retail seems to only like the micros which are often a killing ground for them. so I hope you can improve yourself and become one of the 10% who can win in the commods market. sounds brutal but too true.

you dont need to go this far but i did a 2 year uni course (part time) on finance. I found the finance stuff fascinating. The crunching of numbers. opex capex ebita balance sheets and the real story which i found dead useful before the last run of the goldies on which weightings to give to each. i was wrong on some like slr but right more often than wrong. it is all learning.

i also did an afternoon course with an experienced financial accountant who has advised corporations for years and he made a lot of sense on a lot of things financial not just for markets but for life. I would recommend at least a finance seminar.
I also have friends with funds who help with the background picture. it is now almost wholesale where a business runs the funds but how the buys and sell are funnelled through a larger wholesaler.
then we have the real life experiences and what i call the Corporate Chart - there is very little out there I have found that covers it. cap raises, soph investors, lunches with investors all combine with the quarterlies and working out best times to buy, hold and sell. then we have the macros, the $US, the Fed and there is the practical experience of working with corporations and funds and gant charts for their projects and their internal workings

It all helps with perspective.

I found the works on Gann interesting but frustrating as it is so inexact but his work on cycles make sense and provide a useful perspective and is most closly alligned to my style in the post GFC recovering world
it is a new world now. gfc is history. we have the US Fed and QE
i also include good brokers in what i call the corporate chart. they normally know when something is going to run. the cap raising managers will raise a stock price artificially then have a cap raise and then the news flow starts. so a good broker is a useful contact. we did have someone on here who was very good at picking the next micro to run. i suspect he was a broker. he was quite clear he steered clear of all charts and he was damn useful except when things were at a high. his mantra of buy more blindly doesn't always work.

Experience - if you have a chance to see what goes on with these corporations it will create some new perceptions. there is a lot in the news you can read. i always liked the story of joe kennedy making money on the market in the 1920s with his own politely called system. then he was put in charge of the governance of wall street to stop wall st doing what he had done successfully for years. they called it putting the fox in charge of the hen house. then in modern times i sat in with a fund which had lost half a billion in th gfc. there was no public outcry. they were a respectable business. the public never heard of the loss. whenever you put your money into a stock you just do not know what is happening or going to happen. it is all what i call life experience.
i am sure you have your own experiences and contacts.
there are a lot on this thread all with different methods and i enjoy it and find it useful. what worked post gfc is ending. we are in a new world. i hope we end up in a supercycle over the next 10 years but we will see.

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Hi Dave
I think you already have a good handle on charts.
this post from last year touches on volume and the VSA approach of Williams in his book.
Charts can provide direction and fib levels, horizontals which always give a reaction and fib levels but volume is key for my trades anyway

There are vanilla charts which show volume but then you need to be able to read it. Experience and time working through it if you decide to make it an in depth study.
I traded the US market in gfc days with a US fund and used their services and data until they went under.
There are lots who will provide volume info but, as I said, you need to decide that is what you want to do as it normally costs. Others here may be able to direct you to volume services free of charge but the ones I have found normally charge.
(I use data provided by a contact from the US I still have)
A starting point is trading view which will give you some volume data free of charge (i think) but then you have to subscribe for the spx.
The spx is used by professional trading houses rather than the dow. it is said to be more accurate for the next moves.
for trading the asx you should be able to use charts from your own broker and their volume data but you need to be able to split it from the bigger funds and retail and work out what it all means
a simple example is my mate who runs a fund. he is clueless on stocks and his fund uses a bigger fund which decides investments for a group of smaller funds including his. during covid the word was stay invested and stay long
a simple example of vsa is where volume comes in and price rises then stay with the trade but when volume again comes in and price stagnates then get out
you can see that in lots of ASX charts

you can then scale it back to different timeframes. it depends on the timeframe for your trades. we generally are not daytraders here but as i said in my post last year I start with the hammer down. the hammer when it works is great for showing a change in trend direction
it will finally turn around on daily or even hourly if you are a micro trader. we get lovely green candles. if we are lucky the volume and rises extend to longer time frames. eg weekly and if we are really lucky then on the monthly
we had multi monthly runs on gold in 2020.

i find it a lot easier to start a trade on the daily green candle but on the monthly hammer down (as in the current SPX scenario). the risk is less. it has already fallen. trying to decide direction thereafter carries greater risk.
anyway I am rambling again. i just want to get in ahead of retail and sell when the bigger players sell. sprotts are pretty good to follow. they were in and out of gold early and then into uranium but nothing beats your own research
i find volume the most important part of the process and there are lots of resources available.
I hope that helps. volume on daily has come in on the spx and copper. it has finally started to come up on silver but it is meaningless. it is a start only. gold has very little volume still.
it is a blunt tool. the bigger funds seem to view it as a type of landbank and will buy at lows months ahead of the rise. they know when it is more likely to turn up. they then sell when retail come in and move on. so it is a blunt tool but gives confidence ahead of a turnaround. it is why i tend to trade longer term and try and be ahead of the curve as someone famous said.
i buy the hammers when volume turns up and sit and move patiently towards each new opportunity