Trends & the Support/Resistance Panel
Identify the regime and use the platform's pivots and fractals for entries, stops, and targets
Strip every indicator off your chart and two things remain: the trend, and the levels at which price keeps reacting. Master those two and you have built the foundation every other technique sits on top of. A trend is a sequence of price levels that drift in one direction.
An uptrend prints higher highs and higher lows. A downtrend prints lower highs and lower lows. A range prints neither — price oscillates between roughly the same two levels.
The first job of any technician is regime identification: which of the three is the chart in? Stan Weinstein 1988 codified a four-stage cycle every stock cycles through: Stage 1 (basing — flat after a downtrend), Stage 2 (advancing — rising 30-week MA, breakouts), Stage 3 (topping — flat after an uptrend), Stage 4 (declining — falling 30-week MA, breakdowns). Long ONLY in Stage 2.
That is the opening. Finishing a lesson is where it stops being interesting and starts being useful: the full lesson runs to 6 sections and ends with 4 practice questions. A free account is what opens the rest, and the other 255 lessons in the Academy with it. No card.
What this lesson covers
- 1Stage Analysis — Where Is the Stock in Its Cycle?
- 2Support and Resistance Are Zones, Not Lines
- 3The Polarity Principle
- 4Floor Pivots — The Classic Construction
- 5Real-world: Apple's 2014 Long Base
- 6Summary