The basic idea of charting is pretty simple.
The basic tenant: You predict future price action of crowd wisdom through the ebb and flow of past price action.
Picking and calibrating your signals is where everyone has their own methods.
Chart interval is equally important in calibrating; too short and you have many false signals, too long and you risk the trend being over (or losing a big chunk of it) before you get confirmation.
And the final step is learning discipline to trust your trade strategy (if it doesn't work, change your strategy, don't veer off from it) and setting up stop losses because every pattern will always sometime somewhere have an exception but one outlier a new pattern does not make.
And it works because everybody does it, the only way you can avoid it is either straight fundamentals trading or avoiding charts and staring at live order books instead. Psychologically, humans like patterns.
The basic tenant: You predict future price action of crowd wisdom through the ebb and flow of past price action.
Picking and calibrating your signals is where everyone has their own methods.
Chart interval is equally important in calibrating; too short and you have many false signals, too long and you risk the trend being over (or losing a big chunk of it) before you get confirmation.
And the final step is learning discipline to trust your trade strategy (if it doesn't work, change your strategy, don't veer off from it) and setting up stop losses because every pattern will always sometime somewhere have an exception but one outlier a new pattern does not make.
And it works because everybody does it, the only way you can avoid it is either straight fundamentals trading or avoiding charts and staring at live order books instead. Psychologically, humans like patterns.
I usually try not to tell you what to do -- too crowded there. I'll point out what price points/trends/patterns the pros are looking at and let you interpret what that means for your portfolio.