Technical Analysis
About this track
Candlesticks, market structure, chart patterns, every major indicator, and how to assemble them into a written system you can actually test. Built around interactive labs — you move the parameters and watch what breaks.
Technical analysis is the study of price and volume — reading what buyers and sellers are actually doing on the chart rather than what a company is worth. This track teaches it from the ground up for the Indian market: candlestick anatomy and patterns, trend structure, support and resistance, the major indicators (moving averages, RSI, MACD, Bollinger Bands and Supertrend), volume, pivot points and CPR, and finally how to combine them into a written, testable trading system.
It is taught honestly — every method comes with where it fails. RSI can sit "overbought" for months in a strong trend, most chart patterns work only a little better than a coin flip, and an indicator on a sideways chart mostly manufactures whipsaws. The aim is never more signals; it is knowing which signal to trust, in which market, and how much to risk on it.
Modules
01Foundations
What technical analysis claims, what it can and cannot do, and how to read a chart before you read a single indicator.
02Candlestick patterns
The reversal and continuation patterns worth knowing, and the discipline that separates using them from hallucinating them.
03Market structure & price action
Trends, levels, trendlines and the classical chart patterns — the layer that makes every indicator make sense.
04Indicators
Moving averages, RSI, MACD, Bollinger Bands, ADX and Fibonacci — how each is built, what it genuinely adds, and where each one lies to you.
- Moving averages12m
- The Hull moving average and the lag problem8m
- RSI — relative strength index11m
- MACD10m
- Bollinger Bands and measuring volatility10m
- Keltner channels, and how they differ from Bollinger8m
- Parabolic SAR: the stop-and-reverse dots8m
- The Aroon indicator: how new is the trend?8m
- The Money Flow Index: RSI with volume8m
- The Coppock curve: a long-term buy signal8m
- The Choppiness Index: is there a trend at all?8m
- Linear regression channels: the trendline maths draws for you8m
- The Vortex Indicator: two lines that cross when the trend turns8m
- The Guppy Multiple Moving Average: two crowds on one chart8m
- Elder Ray: measuring who is winning above and below the average8m
- Williams Fractals: marking the swing points the eye keeps missing8m
- TRIX: a momentum line smoothed until only the trend is left8m
- The Chande Momentum Oscillator: raw momentum, unsmoothed8m
- Ease of Movement: how hard the volume had to work8m
- ADX and Fibonacci retracements10m
- The rest of the oscillators — and why you need fewer than you think11m
- Relative strength and sector rotation11m
- Supertrend: the trailing stop that looks like magic11m
- Pivot points and CPR: the intraday map11m
05Building a trading system
Turning scattered signals into a written, testable process — entries, exits, timeframes and four strategy templates.
06Applying it
Choosing a trading style honestly, reading market breadth, working without indicators, and what open interest data actually tells you.
07Methods & edges
Wyckoff, Elliott Wave assessed honestly, alternative chart types, Indian calendar effects, trading the open and close, and pairs trading.
08Execution & scale
Volume profile, order flow, why indices behave differently from stocks, portfolio heat across open trades, and systematic trading in India.
09Edges and survival
Anchored VWAP, recognising market regimes, trading around scheduled events, scaling in and out of positions, and the risk-of-ruin arithmetic underneath all of it.
10Context and workflow
Correlation between positions, intermarket analysis, Market Profile, filtering whipsaws, and the weekly scanning routine that turns technique into a process.
11Stops, signals and system life
Where the stop actually goes, reading divergence honestly, volatility squeezes, liquidity and slippage, and how to tell when a strategy is genuinely finished.
- Where the stop actually goes12m
- Divergence: when price and momentum disagree11m
- The squeeze: quiet before the move11m
- Why your fill is worse than the chart11m
- When is a system actually dead?12m
- Value at Risk: the loss you should not exceed on a normal day11m
- Expected shortfall: how bad the bad days really are10m
- Skewness and kurtosis: why returns aren’t a bell curve10m
- The ulcer index: risk measured by the pain of drawdowns9m
12Evidence and exits
Volume spread analysis, where to take profit, reading a backtest report properly, what failed patterns tell you, and running several systems at once.
13Mechanics and discipline
Adjusted prices, order types that actually matter, beta and index sensitivity, momentum ranking systems, and the case for weekly charts.
14Behaviour and testing
Stock personality, circuit limits and halts, forward testing honestly, sizing by volatility, and what unscheduled news does to a chart.
15Testing what you believe
Backtesting honestly, reading the Ichimoku cloud, why drawdown matters more than volatility, Donchian breakouts, and when volume disagrees with price.
- Monte Carlo: the equity curve you happened to get13m
- Ichimoku: five lines that describe a whole trend12m
- Drawdown, not volatility, is what you actually feel12m
- Donchian channels: the rule that made the Turtles12m
- Money flow: when turnover disagrees with price12m
- Sharpe and Sortino: return you can compare10m
- The Treynor ratio: return per unit of market risk9m
- The information ratio: skill against a benchmark9m
- Jensen’s alpha: return the market did not owe you9m
- Modern portfolio theory: the free lunch of diversification11m
- Risk parity: balance the risk, not the money10m
- Capture ratios: how a fund behaves in up and down markets9m
16Sizing, stops and volatility
India VIX, trading mean reversion, trailing stops that give a winner room, the Kelly criterion and why half of it is the practical answer, and log versus linear scale.
17Factors and market structure
The factors that explain most returns, the pre-open auction, reading bulk and block deals, why price reaches for clustered stops, and the 52-week high anomaly.
18The derivatives layer
The F&O ban period, expiry week and physical settlement, GIFT Nifty and the overnight session, lot sizes and margin, and how short selling actually works in India.
- The F&O ban period: when a stock can only be traded to reduce13m
- Expiry week: rollovers, cost of carry and physical settlement14m
- GIFT Nifty and the seventeen hours the market is shut12m
- Lot size and margin: the smallest bet the exchange will let you make12m
- Short selling in India: what it takes to bet against a chart13m
19The tape, in Indian conditions
Why there is no Indian tape in the American sense, what delivery percentage measures, how disclosed quantity and price bands shape the order book, the participant-wise flow data India publishes and nobody else does, and how to translate an imported setup.
20Charts that are not stocks
How a multi-year futures chart is stitched together and what that does to your levels, what a commodity chart contains besides the commodity, why a currency chart is two stories at once, what an index level actually is, and why the option premium is the one series you should not be drawing trendlines on.
21When the chart is not one company
What happens to a target’s chart once a swap ratio is fixed, how to read a listing that has no history, why a share count can change under a price that does not move, how to date the start of a usable sample, and what the last candle of a suspended stock is actually worth.
22What you can actually transact
Why a level computed to four decimals is not a price anyone can bid, why the position your risk rule asked for often does not exist, what the horizontal axis is actually counting, what sits between an exchange-traded fund’s chart and the index it follows, and how to audit a chart that arrived as a screenshot.
23How a bar gets made
Why a 375-minute session cannot be cut into hours, why your intraday moving average at 9.20 is mostly yesterday afternoon, why the twenty bars next to this one are the wrong twenty to compare it with, why the exchange’s daily candle and your platform’s daily candle close at different prices every single day, and the one thing four numbers can never tell you about the sequence that produced them.
24When the numbers are wrong
One trade nobody meant to make, sitting in your average true range for a month. A candle drawn across two hours in which not a single share changed hands. The right three letters attached to a security you cannot square off intraday. A swing low your chart marks that was not marked on the day. And the cleaning rule that quietly reads the future.
25The statistics under the chart
Why a thin stock’s chart shows movement that never happened, why two people size the same trade 60% apart from the same risk rule, where the 95% on a two-sigma band actually comes from, how to test in ten minutes whether a name trends or reverts, and why the average trade in a strategy report cannot be compounded.
26When the price is tied to a number
Why a bond chart has a drift with a sign built into it and a volatility that shrinks every year on its own, why five years of a REIT chart can show a tenth of what the holding actually returned, why a gold bond can sit three per cent below the gold it is denominated in for years with nobody closing the gap, and why the instrument printing on your top-gainers list at plus sixty-three per cent will be worth exactly nothing by Friday.
27Derivatives, properly
Futures pricing and the basis, the option greeks, implied volatility, option payoffs and basic strategies, using derivatives to hedge, trading volatility with straddles and strangles, defined-risk credit spreads and iron condors, and expiry and physical settlement — the advanced mechanics beneath India’s F&O market, taught without pretending the odds are better than they are.
- Futures pricing and the basis13m
- The option greeks: delta, gamma, theta, vega14m
- Implied volatility, and why premiums move without the stock12m
- Option payoffs and the basic strategies14m
- Hedging a portfolio with derivatives13m
- Straddles, strangles and trading volatility itself13m
- Credit spreads and the iron condor13m
- Expiry, assignment and settlement12m
- Put-call parity: the equation that links every option10m
- Black-Scholes: what an option is actually worth11m
Technical Analysis
Candlesticks, market structure, chart patterns, every major indicator, and how to assemble them into a written system you can actually test. Built around interactive labs — you move the parameters and watch what breaks.
Start with “What technical analysis actually claims” →- Lessons
- 172
- Modules
- 27
- Reading time
- 32.6 hrs
- Quiz questions
- 221
Technical analysis is the study of price and volume — reading what buyers and sellers are actually doing on the chart rather than what a company is worth. This track teaches it from the ground up for the Indian market: candlestick anatomy and patterns, trend structure, support and resistance, the major indicators (moving averages, RSI, MACD, Bollinger Bands and Supertrend), volume, pivot points and CPR, and finally how to combine them into a written, testable trading system.
It is taught honestly — every method comes with where it fails. RSI can sit "overbought" for months in a strong trend, most chart patterns work only a little better than a coin flip, and an indicator on a sideways chart mostly manufactures whipsaws. The aim is never more signals; it is knowing which signal to trust, in which market, and how much to risk on it.
Foundations
What technical analysis claims, what it can and cannot do, and how to read a chart before you read a single indicator.
What technical analysis actually claims
The three assumptions underneath every chart pattern and indicator — and an honest account of where they hold and where they break.
How much of a chart is actually noise
Randomness draws convincing patterns. What separates a move that means something from one that does not — and why the honest answer depends mostly on how far you are zoomed out.
Chart types and choosing a timeframe
Line, bar and candlestick charts; linear versus logarithmic scale; and why picking the wrong timeframe is the most common beginner error.
Reading a candlestick
Four numbers per candle, and how the shape they make tells you who won the session and by how much.
Volume: the only independent confirmation you have
Price can be moved by a handful of orders. Volume tells you how many people actually meant it.
Candlestick patterns
The reversal and continuation patterns worth knowing, and the discipline that separates using them from hallucinating them.
Single-candle patterns
Hammer, shooting star, doji and marubozu — what each one records about a session, and where each one actually matters.
Two- and three-candle patterns
Engulfing, harami, piercing line, morning and evening stars — the patterns that describe a genuine change of control.
Continuation patterns: when the candles say carry on
Three white soldiers, three black crows and the rising and falling three methods — the shapes that describe a trend pausing rather than turning.
The candle that has not closed yet
At 11 a.m. the daily candle is a hammer, by 1 p.m. it is a marubozu and at the bell it is a doji. Nothing is a pattern until the period ends.
Do candlestick patterns actually work?
How to answer that for yourself with a notebook and forty occurrences, instead of trusting a table that says a morning star is 78% reliable.
Market structure & price action
Trends, levels, trendlines and the classical chart patterns — the layer that makes every indicator make sense.
Trends, and how to tell when one has ended
Higher highs and higher lows, the three phases of a trend, and the specific event that marks a change of character.
Support and resistance
Why price stops at the same places repeatedly, why levels flip roles when broken, and how to draw them without fooling yourself.
Trendlines and channels
The most abused tool in technical analysis, and the discipline that makes it useful — how to draw a line you did not simply wish into existence.
Classical chart patterns
Head and shoulders, double tops, triangles, flags and cup-and-handle — what each one is really describing, and how to measure a target.
Gaps
The Indian market is shut for 17 hours a day, so it gaps constantly. The five kinds, which ones fill, and why an unfilled gap becomes a level.
Indicators
Moving averages, RSI, MACD, Bollinger Bands, ADX and Fibonacci — how each is built, what it genuinely adds, and where each one lies to you.
Moving averages
The most useful indicator ever invented, and the one most often misused. Periods, types, crossovers, and dynamic support.
The Hull moving average and the lag problem
Every moving average lags — it is an average of the past. The Hull moving average is a clever attempt to cut that lag while staying smooth, and understanding how it does so shows exactly what it gives up.
RSI — relative strength index
What RSI measures, why "above 70 means sell" destroys accounts, and the two ways professionals actually use it.
MACD
Two moving averages, a signal line and a histogram — what each component adds, and why crossovers alone are not a strategy.
Bollinger Bands and measuring volatility
Bands that adapt to volatility, the squeeze that precedes big moves, and why ATR should decide your stop distance.
Keltner channels, and how they differ from Bollinger
A volatility channel built on ATR rather than standard deviation. Why it looks smoother than Bollinger, what that trade-off costs you, and the squeeze setup that uses both together.
Parabolic SAR: the stop-and-reverse dots
The dots that trail above or below price, tightening as a trend runs. Parabolic SAR is a ready-made trailing stop — excellent in a trend, and a whipsaw machine in a range.
The Aroon indicator: how new is the trend?
Most indicators measure how far price moved. Aroon measures how recently — how long since the last high or low — which lets it flag a brand-new trend, or a market gone to sleep, early.
The Money Flow Index: RSI with volume
The Money Flow Index is essentially RSI that also counts volume — an overbought/oversold line that asks not just how far price moved, but how much conviction was behind it.
The Coppock curve: a long-term buy signal
A momentum indicator built for patient investors on monthly charts, designed to flag the turn after a major market bottom. Its strange origin, how to read its one signal, and why it is buy-only.
The Choppiness Index: is there a trend at all?
Half the indicators in this track only work in a trend — and most whipsaw badly without one. The Choppiness Index answers the prior question they all assume: is the market trending, or just chopping sideways?
Linear regression channels: the trendline maths draws for you
Two people draw two different trendlines on the same chart. A linear regression channel removes the argument — it fits the trend statistically and sets its bands by standard deviation, so the line is the same for everyone.
The Vortex Indicator: two lines that cross when the trend turns
The Vortex Indicator boils a trend down to a contest between two lines — one for upward force, one for downward. When they cross, the balance of the trend has shifted. It is simple to read and, like every crossover tool, prone to whipsaws in a flat market.
The Guppy Multiple Moving Average: two crowds on one chart
The GMMA stacks two bundles of moving averages — a fast one standing for short-term traders and a slow one for long-term investors — so you can watch the two crowds agree, disagree, and hand the trend back and forth.
Elder Ray: measuring who is winning above and below the average
Elder Ray splits a trend into two forces — how far buyers can push price above the market’s idea of fair value, and how far sellers can push it below. Read alongside the trend, it times entries into pullbacks.
Williams Fractals: marking the swing points the eye keeps missing
A Williams Fractal is a simple, mechanical way to mark a swing high or low — a five-bar pattern that stamps the turning points on a chart objectively, so you stop arguing with yourself about where the last high really was.
TRIX: a momentum line smoothed until only the trend is left
TRIX smooths price three times over before measuring its momentum, so the small wiggles that trigger false signals on other oscillators are filtered out. What survives is a clean momentum line — bought at the cost of arriving a little late.
The Chande Momentum Oscillator: raw momentum, unsmoothed
The CMO measures momentum the blunt way — up moves minus down moves over their total — and refuses to smooth the result. That makes it faster and more jagged than the RSI, catching turns earlier at the cost of more noise.
Ease of Movement: how hard the volume had to work
Ease of Movement asks a single question of every bar: how much volume did it take to move the price this far? When price drifts up on light volume, the path of least resistance is up — and this indicator is built to show it.
ADX and Fibonacci retracements
One indicator that tells you whether to trust your other indicators, and one that works largely because everyone watches it.
The rest of the oscillators — and why you need fewer than you think
Stochastic, CCI, Williams %R, SuperTrend and OBV, plus the most important idea in this module: most indicators are the same information wearing different clothes.
Relative strength and sector rotation
A stock going up is not the same as a stock worth owning. Measuring performance against the index, and following where money is actually rotating.
Supertrend: the trailing stop that looks like magic
The green-and-red line on every Indian retail chart. What it computes, what its two settings do, and why it is brilliant in a trend and brutal in a range.
Pivot points and CPR: the intraday map
Yesterday’s range draws today’s levels. What the pivot, R1–R3, S1–S3 and the Central Pivot Range mean — and why a narrow CPR hints at a trending day.
Building a trading system
Turning scattered signals into a written, testable process — entries, exits, timeframes and four strategy templates.
From signals to a system
The six components every complete system needs, and why most people never write theirs down.
Four strategy templates
Trend following, breakout, pullback and mean reversion — complete rule sets, the regime each needs, and how each one fails.
Entries, exits and managing a live trade
Everyone plans the entry. Almost nobody plans the exit — which is why most people hold losers and sell winners.
Multi-timeframe analysis
Three charts, three jobs. How to use a higher timeframe for direction without letting it rescue a trade that has already failed.
Backtesting without fooling yourself
Every strategy looks brilliant on past data. The specific ways a backtest lies, and the checks that separate an edge from a coincidence.
Applying it
Choosing a trading style honestly, reading market breadth, working without indicators, and what open interest data actually tells you.
Intraday, swing or positional — choosing honestly
Four styles, their real time cost, their real cost structure, and the one that suits almost everyone with a job.
Why two apps show you different charts
Same stock, same day, two screens — two different closing prices, two different volume bars and two different RSI readings. Where the differences come from, and which of them matter.
Market breadth: what the index is hiding
The index can rise while most stocks fall. Advance-decline, new highs versus new lows, and the percentage above the 200-DMA.
Price action: trading a naked chart
Strip every indicator off and what remains is structure, levels, momentum and participation — which is where the information was all along.
Open interest, PCR and the data everyone quotes
India-specific derivatives data — what open interest actually measures, how to read it with price, and why max pain is mostly folklore.
Methods & edges
Wyckoff, Elliott Wave assessed honestly, alternative chart types, Indian calendar effects, trading the open and close, and pairs trading.
The Wyckoff method
A century-old framework for reading accumulation and distribution — and the one part of it, the spring, that is genuinely useful.
Elliott Wave, assessed honestly
The most elaborate framework in technical analysis, what it claims, and a clear-eyed account of why it is so hard to use.
Heikin-Ashi, Renko and point & figure
Charts that trade information for clarity — what each one discards, and the specific mistake each one invites.
Seasonality and the Indian calendar
Budget week, results season, monsoon, expiry Thursday and Muhurat trading — the recurring dates that genuinely change market behaviour.
The open and the close
The first fifteen minutes and the last thirty behave nothing like the rest of the day — and both have specific rules.
Pairs trading and relative value
Betting that two related stocks converge rather than that either one rises — the logic, the maths and the way it fails.
Gann, honestly: angles, squares, and what survives scrutiny
W.D. Gann’s methods are sold as a secret geometry of the market. What the angles and the square of nine actually are, why the legend outran the evidence, and the one modest idea worth keeping.
Execution & scale
Volume profile, order flow, why indices behave differently from stocks, portfolio heat across open trades, and systematic trading in India.
Volume profile: volume by price, not by time
Standard charts show how much traded each day. Volume profile shows how much traded at each price — which is the more useful question.
Order flow and reading the tape
What the depth book and the trade tape actually show, what can be inferred from them, and an honest account of the limits for a retail trader.
Indices behave differently from stocks
An index is a weighted average of many things, and that changes almost everything — volatility, mean reversion, gaps and the risks you carry.
Managing several open trades at once
Position sizing protects you from one trade. Portfolio heat protects you from all of them going wrong on the same day.
Systematic and algorithmic trading in India
What automation genuinely solves, what it does not, the regulatory position for retail, and the honest cost of building it.
Footprint charts and cumulative volume delta
A candle tells you where price went, not who was aggressive getting it there. Footprint charts and cumulative volume delta try to show that — and why most Indian retail traders cannot, and need not, use them.
Edges and survival
Anchored VWAP, recognising market regimes, trading around scheduled events, scaling in and out of positions, and the risk-of-ruin arithmetic underneath all of it.
Anchored VWAP: the price everyone actually paid
Drop an anchor at an event and VWAP tells you the average price paid since — turning "is this level important?" into a question with an actual answer.
Market regimes: knowing when your system will not work
Every strategy has conditions it needs. Trend systems die in chop, mean-reversion dies in trends — and most losing streaks are a regime change, not a broken system.
Results, budget and index rebalancing
Scheduled events break the assumptions technical setups rely on. What to do with a position running into earnings, and where event-driven flows create genuine edges.
Scaling in, pyramiding and partial exits
Entering and exiting in pieces changes your average price, your risk and your psychology. Which of those changes help, and which quietly turn a winner into a loser.
Risk of ruin: the arithmetic that decides if you survive
A positive-expectancy system can still destroy an account. The variable that decides it is size — and the relationship is far less forgiving than it looks.
Context and workflow
Correlation between positions, intermarket analysis, Market Profile, filtering whipsaws, and the weekly scanning routine that turns technique into a process.
When six positions are really one bet
Position sizing protects you per trade. Correlation is what happens when every trade turns out to be the same trade on a bad day.
What bonds, the rupee and crude tell the equity chart
Equities do not move in isolation. Rates, currency and commodities set the conditions, and reading them explains sector days that otherwise look random.
Market Profile: reading time instead of volume
A distribution of where price spent its time, rather than where it traded most. Value areas, the point of control, and why balance and imbalance matter more than patterns.
Cutting false signals without cutting the good ones
Every filter that removes bad trades removes some good ones too. How to measure that trade-off instead of guessing at it.
Scanning, watchlists and a weekly routine
Technique without a routine produces sporadic results. The workflow that turns 2,000 listed companies into five prepared trades a week.
Stops, signals and system life
Where the stop actually goes, reading divergence honestly, volatility squeezes, liquidity and slippage, and how to tell when a strategy is genuinely finished.
Where the stop actually goes
A stop belongs where your idea is proven wrong, not where your loss reaches a comfortable number. Four methods, and how to choose between them.
Divergence: when price and momentum disagree
One of the most useful signals in technical analysis and one of the most abused. What it genuinely indicates, and why trading it alone loses money.
The squeeze: quiet before the move
Volatility contracts and expands in cycles. When a chart goes unusually quiet, something is usually being built — though the direction is not in the signal.
Why your fill is worse than the chart
The chart shows a price at which somebody traded. Whether you could have traded there, in your size, is an entirely separate question.
When is a system actually dead?
Every strategy has a bad run, and most bad runs are normal. Deciding in advance what would prove the edge is gone is the only way to avoid quitting at the bottom.
Value at Risk: the loss you should not exceed on a normal day
A single number for how much a portfolio might lose, at a chosen confidence, over a chosen horizon. How VaR is built, what it deliberately hides, and why its blind spot has caused real disasters.
Expected shortfall: how bad the bad days really are
Value at Risk tells you a bad day happens — expected shortfall tells you how bad. The metric that fills VaR’s dangerous blind spot, why regulators now prefer it, and what it still cannot see.
Skewness and kurtosis: why returns aren’t a bell curve
Volatility assumes returns follow a neat bell curve. They don’t. How skewness and kurtosis measure the lopsidedness and fat tails that volatility misses — and why the difference is where crashes live.
The ulcer index: risk measured by the pain of drawdowns
Volatility punishes upside moves as if they were risk. The ulcer index measures only what actually hurts — how deep drawdowns go and how long they last — capturing the real experience of holding an investment.
Evidence and exits
Volume spread analysis, where to take profit, reading a backtest report properly, what failed patterns tell you, and running several systems at once.
Effort versus result
Volume is effort and the candle range is the result. When they disagree, someone large is on the other side — which is the entire idea behind volume spread analysis.
Where to take profit
Entries get all the attention and exits decide the outcome. Four ways to set a target, and why the best traders mostly do not use targets at all.
Reading a strategy report
Sharpe, profit factor, max drawdown, MAR. What each metric hides, which one to trust, and the single number most reports leave out.
What a failed pattern tells you
A pattern that does not work is not noise. The failure itself is often a stronger signal than the pattern would have been.
Running more than one system
Two uncorrelated strategies are genuinely better than one. Two correlated ones are the same strategy at double size, plus the confusion of not knowing which is working.
Mechanics and discipline
Adjusted prices, order types that actually matter, beta and index sensitivity, momentum ranking systems, and the case for weekly charts.
Splits, bonuses and why your chart lies
A stock that "fell 50%" may have done a 1:1 bonus. Whether your data is adjusted decides whether every level, indicator and backtest is meaningful.
Getting the order you actually intended
GTT, AMO, stop-loss market versus limit, iceberg and bracket orders. The mechanics that decide whether your plan survives contact with the order book.
How much of that move was just the index
Your stock rose 4%. If the index rose 3% and the stock has a beta of 1.3, it did nothing at all — and separating the two changes what you conclude.
Ranking instead of picking
Rank the universe by strength, hold the top slice, replace it periodically. Mechanical, well documented, and psychologically very hard to follow.
The case for slowing down
Most retail traders operate on timeframes that maximise noise, cost and stress while minimising their actual advantage. The weekly chart fixes all three.
Behaviour and testing
Stock personality, circuit limits and halts, forward testing honestly, sizing by volatility, and what unscheduled news does to a chart.
Every stock has a personality
The same setup behaves differently on different instruments. Knowing how a stock habitually moves is an edge that only comes from watching the same names for years.
Circuit limits, halts and when the chart stops
A price band means the stock can show a move you could not have traded. Where they apply, what they do to a stop-loss, and why smallcaps are worst affected.
Paper trading properly, and what it cannot tell you
Forward testing catches things a backtest never will, and it lies about the one thing that decides most outcomes.
Sizing by volatility, not by rupees
Equal rupee positions carry unequal risk. Volatility-adjusted sizing makes every position contribute roughly the same amount, which is what you probably intended.
When news arrives without a date
Scheduled events can be planned around. A regulatory order, a fire, a resignation cannot — and the first reaction is usually the wrong one to trade.
Testing what you believe
Backtesting honestly, reading the Ichimoku cloud, why drawdown matters more than volatility, Donchian breakouts, and when volume disagrees with price.
Monte Carlo: the equity curve you happened to get
Your results came in one particular order. Reshuffling that order thousands of times shows the range of outcomes the same edge could have produced — and it is wider than anyone expects.
Ichimoku: five lines that describe a whole trend
It looks like the busiest indicator on any platform and it is really one idea repeated at four speeds. What each line does, and the only reading that matters.
Drawdown, not volatility, is what you actually feel
Volatility is a statistic. Drawdown is the number that makes people sell. How to read the underwater curve, and why recovery time matters more than depth.
Donchian channels: the rule that made the Turtles
Buy a new twenty-day high, sell a new twenty-day low. It was published, taught to novices, and still worked — which tells you something about why most rules fail.
Money flow: when turnover disagrees with price
RSI asks whether it went up. Money flow asks whether money followed it up. The divergence between the two is worth more than either reading alone.
Sharpe and Sortino: return you can compare
A raw return means nothing until you know the risk taken to earn it. How the Sharpe ratio prices return per unit of volatility, why the Sortino ratio fixes its biggest flaw, and what counts as good.
The Treynor ratio: return per unit of market risk
Like the Sharpe ratio, but it divides by beta instead of volatility — return per unit of market risk. Why that difference matters, and when Treynor is the right lens and when it is not.
The information ratio: skill against a benchmark
The metric that judges an active manager: how much they beat their benchmark, per unit of the risk they took deviating from it. Why it is the truest measure of consistent skill.
Jensen’s alpha: return the market did not owe you
Alpha is the return a portfolio earned above what its risk — its beta — entitled it to. How CAPM defines it, why positive alpha is the holy grail, and why so little of it is real.
Modern portfolio theory: the free lunch of diversification
The idea that a portfolio can be worth more than the sum of its risks. How combining imperfectly correlated assets lowers risk without lowering return, and what the efficient frontier really shows.
Risk parity: balance the risk, not the money
A 60/40 portfolio is not 60/40 in risk — equities dominate almost all of it. Risk parity sizes holdings so each contributes equal risk, and why that idea both helps and hides a catch.
Capture ratios: how a fund behaves in up and down markets
Two numbers that reveal a fund’s real character: how much of the market’s gains it captures, and how much of its losses. Why the downside one usually matters more, and what a great pairing looks like.
Sizing, stops and volatility
India VIX, trading mean reversion, trailing stops that give a winner room, the Kelly criterion and why half of it is the practical answer, and log versus linear scale.
India VIX: the market pricing its own nervousness
Not a forecast of direction — a measure of how much movement option buyers are paying up for. What it tells you, and the two ways it is routinely misread.
Mean reversion: trading the rubber band
The mirror image of trend following — many small wins, rare large losses, and a hit rate that flatters until the day it does not. What makes one work where the other fails.
Trailing stops: room to run without giving it all back
A fixed stop protects the entry. A trailing stop protects the profit — and the entire skill is in choosing how loosely to follow.
How much to bet: Kelly, half-Kelly, and why full Kelly ruins people
There is a mathematically optimal fraction to risk on a favourable bet. It is larger than anyone can tolerate, and the reason why is worth understanding properly.
Log or linear: the axis that changes what you see
The same prices, plotted two ways, produce different trendlines, different patterns and different conclusions. Which one is right depends on the question.
Factors and market structure
The factors that explain most returns, the pre-open auction, reading bulk and block deals, why price reaches for clustered stops, and the 52-week high anomaly.
Factors: what actually explains a return
Momentum, value, quality, size and low volatility. Decades of evidence say most of what looks like stock-picking skill is exposure to one of these — and they can be bought directly.
The pre-open auction and the first fifteen minutes
Nine to nine-fifteen decides the opening price of every NSE stock through a mechanism most retail traders have never read about — and it is where a surprising number of bad fills happen.
Bulk and block deals: reading who actually bought
Every large trade is disclosed by name to the exchange the same evening. It is free, it is specific, and almost no retail investor looks at it.
Why price reaches for your stop
It is rarely a conspiracy and it is not random either. Stops cluster at the same obvious levels, and clustered stops are liquidity that something has to consume.
The 52-week high: the level people get backwards
Most investors treat a new high as a reason to wait. Decades of evidence across markets say it is closer to the opposite, and the reason why is a behavioural quirk.
The derivatives layer
The F&O ban period, expiry week and physical settlement, GIFT Nifty and the overnight session, lot sizes and margin, and how short selling actually works in India.
The F&O ban period: when a stock can only be traded to reduce
When open interest crosses 95% of a stock’s market-wide limit, only position-reducing trades are allowed. The chart that follows is plumbing, not opinion.
Expiry week: rollovers, cost of carry and physical settlement
Since 2019 every stock derivative open at expiry settles in shares. Delivery margins ramp over four sessions, on a calendar that owes nothing to the business.
GIFT Nifty and the seventeen hours the market is shut
Indian equities are shut while America trades a full session. GIFT Nifty fills the gap — and says far less about tomorrow’s open than people assume.
Lot size and margin: the smallest bet the exchange will let you make
In the cash market you choose the position size. In derivatives the exchange fixes the lot, and margin is collateral against loss — not the amount at risk.
Short selling in India: what it takes to bet against a chart
Naked shorting is not permitted here, so a bearish view runs through one of four routes — each with its own cost, its own horizon and its own failure mode.
The tape, in Indian conditions
Why there is no Indian tape in the American sense, what delivery percentage measures, how disclosed quantity and price bands shape the order book, the participant-wise flow data India publishes and nobody else does, and how to translate an imported setup.
There is no tape: what an Indian screen is actually showing you
The American tape-reading vocabulary assumes a consolidated feed, a protected best quote and named market makers. India has none of the three, and the substitutes behave differently.
Delivery percentage: the statistic no American chart carries
India publishes, every evening, how much of the day’s turnover actually resulted in shares moving between demat accounts. The mechanism behind it, and the ratio trap that ruins most readings.
The book you are reading is shaped by its own rules
Disclosed quantity, order-to-trade charges and the operating range change what Indian depth looks like. Half of what people read as intent is the rulebook showing through.
Who actually traded today: the flow data India publishes
Every evening the exchanges print who bought and who sold, split by category. It is a genuine informational asset, and almost every headline drawn from it is read wrongly.
Translating an imported setup onto an Indian chart
The mathematics of an indicator travels perfectly. The session, the bands, the float and the costs do not — and those are what decide whether a rule survives here.
Charts that are not stocks
How a multi-year futures chart is stitched together and what that does to your levels, what a commodity chart contains besides the commodity, why a currency chart is two stories at once, what an index level actually is, and why the option premium is the one series you should not be drawing trendlines on.
The chart that was stitched together
A five-year futures chart is not one instrument’s history. It is dozens of expired contracts spliced end to end by a rule your platform chose, and the splice decides where every historical level sits.
Reading a commodity chart: a price with a warehouse behind it
A domestic chart of an imported commodity contains the international price, the rupee and the duty on bringing it in — three inputs in one line. Plus a session that runs into the night and an underlying that has to be stored.
Reading a currency chart: a ratio with a central bank in it
Every move on USDINR belongs to one of two currencies, the calm is not the same kind of calm you get on a stock, and the contract you are charting is not the market that sets the price.
The index chart nobody can trade
An index has no order book, no bid, no volume and no trade. It is a number recomputed continuously from other people’s prices, and several things a chart reader assumes about it are properties of the formula rather than of the market.
Charting something that expires: the option premium
A premium chart is four moving inputs flattened into one line, on an instrument that did not exist last month and will not exist next month. It is the series most often charted and the one least suited to it.
When the chart is not one company
What happens to a target’s chart once a swap ratio is fixed, how to read a listing that has no history, why a share count can change under a price that does not move, how to date the start of a usable sample, and what the last candle of a suspended stock is actually worth.
The chart of a company being absorbed
The morning a share-swap merger is announced, the target’s price stops being about the target. It becomes the acquirer’s price times a fixed ratio, less a discount — and every signal you take from it is a signal about somebody else.
A chart with no history
A demerged company lists on a Tuesday with no past at all. Every tool in this track needs a lookback window and there is not one, so the first weeks are read with borrowed structure or with none.
The price is a per-share number, and the share can change
Two stocks with identical five-year charts, both back where they started. One holder owns what they always owned; the other owns a much smaller slice of a much larger company, and no indicator can see the difference.
How far back is this chart evidence?
A ten-year backtest on one symbol looked excellent. Somewhere in the middle the company transferred out its principal division and acquired something else, so the test has an average of two businesses in it.
The chart that ends
A holding that has not traded for six weeks, still showing a price and a profit. What the last candle actually is, what survives when the market does not, and why every screen you run is built only from the companies that are still there.
What you can actually transact
Why a level computed to four decimals is not a price anyone can bid, why the position your risk rule asked for often does not exist, what the horizontal axis is actually counting, what sits between an exchange-traded fund’s chart and the index it follows, and how to audit a chart that arrived as a screenshot.
The price can only take certain values
Your written rule says enter 0.2% above the level and stop 1% below. On a ₹3,850 share it means exactly that. On a ₹9.40 share the smallest step the price can take is larger than the buffer you asked for, so the number you wrote is not a price the exchange will accept and you are running a different rule.
The position size you can actually take
The sizing formula returns 2.1 shares. You cannot buy 2.1 shares, and the choice between two and three moves your risk on that trade by nearly half. Everything downstream of the sizing rule assumes a number the market does not sell.
The time axis counts sessions, not days
Twenty bars is not twenty days, a Monday candle carries three calendar days of news, one bar in the year was built from about an hour of trading, and the commodity chart you are correlating against has bars on days your equity chart does not.
Charting a fund that trades
You could not trade the index, so you charted the exchange-traded fund instead. It has an order book, a candle and a volume bar, and it also has a second price published all day that the chart does not show — and the gap between them is where your stop went.
The chart somebody else drew
A screenshot in a group: a clean rising channel, an arrow at the entry, a green box at the target, and the caption "as posted". Everything in the picture is true. Almost everything that would let you evaluate it has been left outside the frame.
How a bar gets made
Why a 375-minute session cannot be cut into hours, why your intraday moving average at 9.20 is mostly yesterday afternoon, why the twenty bars next to this one are the wrong twenty to compare it with, why the exchange’s daily candle and your platform’s daily candle close at different prices every single day, and the one thing four numbers can never tell you about the sequence that produced them.
The session does not divide by sixty
You and a friend trade the same written rule off the same stock on the same day. Your hourly chart triggered at 11.15 and his never triggered at all. Both charts are correct, and the disagreement is arithmetic: 375 does not divide by 60, so somebody had to decide where the cuts fall.
The indicator did not start this morning
At 9.20 the first five-minute candle closes and price crosses the 20-period moving average sitting right there on the chart. It looks like the day making a decision. Nine-tenths of the number that was crossed was computed from yesterday afternoon, and the overnight gap is sitting inside your volatility reading like a brick.
The wrong bars to compare against
Your alert fires on “volume more than three times the twenty-bar average”, and it fires every single morning on roughly the same forty stocks. The filter is not finding unusual participation. On an intraday chart it is finding the time of day, and the fix is to change the denominator rather than the threshold.
Two daily bars for the same day
You download the exchange’s end-of-day file and lay it against the daily candles your platform built by stacking its own intraday bars. The highs agree, the lows agree, and the closes do not — not on one day, on every day. Only one of the two is the number your rule was written about.
Which of them happened first
Two people run the identical rule on the identical data and report a 61% win rate and a 43% win rate. Neither has made a mistake. They differ on what to assume when a bar’s high reached the target and the same bar’s low reached the stop — and four numbers can never say which came first.
When the numbers are wrong
One trade nobody meant to make, sitting in your average true range for a month. A candle drawn across two hours in which not a single share changed hands. The right three letters attached to a security you cannot square off intraday. A swing low your chart marks that was not marked on the day. And the cleaning rule that quietly reads the future.
The print nobody meant to make
At 11.04 a stock that had traded between ₹297 and ₹303 all morning printed ₹268 for about four seconds and came straight back. Your stop was hit and filled at ₹271. The wick is on the chart for good, and so is its effect on every number your system computes from the day’s low.
The bar where nothing traded
The scan says the stock just went from an RSI of 50 to an RSI of 81 and broke a two-month range on rising volume. The whole session was 3,400 shares, and the two hours before the move are drawn on your chart as a hundred and twenty candles in which nothing happened at all.
The right name on the wrong security
You searched the company name, the app offered one result, and the chart that came up is a perfectly accurate chart. It is a chart of a security you cannot square off intraday, or of a second listed line of the same company trading at a permanent discount, or of a history that belonged to a different business.
The line that was not there at the time
Your chart marks a swing low at ₹412 on 14 March with a neat dot, and your rule says buy the swing low. The dot was not on that chart on 14 March. It appeared four sessions later, at ₹431, and if you truncate the data at 14 March and recompute, it disappears again.
The correction that became the error
You wrote a sensible rule to strip the bad prints out of your data: drop any bar whose high is far above the previous close and which price never went near again. It is the most damaging line of code in the whole system, and it is damaging precisely because it is so obviously right.
The statistics under the chart
Why a thin stock’s chart shows movement that never happened, why two people size the same trade 60% apart from the same risk rule, where the 95% on a two-sigma band actually comes from, how to test in ten minutes whether a name trends or reverts, and why the average trade in a strategy report cannot be compounded.
Half the movement is the spread
A thin smallcap oscillates all afternoon on no news, and a pull-back rule tested on it wins four times out of five. Traded live it loses on almost every attempt. The oscillation was real, the backtest was arithmetically correct, and neither of them was about the stock.
Two volatility numbers for one stock
Two people apply the same 1% risk rule to the same stock on the same evening and end up with positions 60% apart. Both said they were allowing two units of volatility. They were using two different estimators and one word.
The two-sigma promise
The band is supposed to contain about 95% of observations. You counted a year of them and got nothing like 95%, and the three worst days each moved further than the model says should happen in a working lifetime. The bands were computed correctly. The 95% was never about your stock.
Does this name trend or revert?
You hold two written systems and a watchlist of eleven names, and you have been deciding which system to run on which name by looking at the chart. There are two measurements that answer the question directly — and the more valuable thing they tell you is how often the question cannot be answered at all.
The average trade you did not get
A strategy report says 200 trades and an average of +2.5% each. You compound that and get a number nobody has ever earned, and the report’s own equity curve ends far below it. Nothing has been faked. The average trade is simply not a figure you are allowed to compound.
When the price is tied to a number
Why a bond chart has a drift with a sign built into it and a volatility that shrinks every year on its own, why five years of a REIT chart can show a tenth of what the holding actually returned, why a gold bond can sit three per cent below the gold it is denominated in for years with nobody closing the gap, and why the instrument printing on your top-gainers list at plus sixty-three per cent will be worth exactly nothing by Friday.
The price that has to end at a number
You open the chart of a listed NCD you hold and read it the way you read a share. It has fallen for four months, dropped vertically in one bar on no news, and its daily range keeps getting smaller. Three separate mechanisms, none of which is anybody buying or selling.
Most of the return is not on the chart
Five years of a REIT chart show ₹300 becoming ₹330 and four gaps down a year that no news explains. The holding returned five times what the chart says, the gaps are on a calendar published in advance, and every price-based statistic in this track is wrong on it by a knowable amount.
The discount with a deadline
Gold is up nine per cent this quarter and the gold bond in your account is up six. Nothing is wrong with either number. The instrument is trading below the gold it is denominated in, no arbitrageur can close the gap, and the gap itself — not the price — is the series worth charting.
The line that expires in your account
Monday’s top-gainers list has a familiar name up sixty-three per cent, and your holding in it is up two. The instrument that moved is a different security with six trading days of life, a value decided by one subtraction, and a terminal value of exactly nothing for anybody who does nothing.
Derivatives, properly
Futures pricing and the basis, the option greeks, implied volatility, option payoffs and basic strategies, using derivatives to hedge, trading volatility with straddles and strangles, defined-risk credit spreads and iron condors, and expiry and physical settlement — the advanced mechanics beneath India’s F&O market, taught without pretending the odds are better than they are.
Futures pricing and the basis
A futures price is not a forecast — it is arithmetic anchored to the spot price by the cost of carry. Understanding the basis explains contango, backwardation, and why the future and the stock must meet at expiry.
The option greeks: delta, gamma, theta, vega
An option’s price moves for four separate reasons at once — the underlying, the speed of that move, the passage of time, and volatility. The greeks name each force, and knowing them is the difference between trading options and being surprised by them.
Implied volatility, and why premiums move without the stock
Implied volatility is the market’s price for uncertainty, and it can move an option premium more than the stock does. It explains why an option gets dearer before results, and why buying it there so often disappoints.
Option payoffs and the basic strategies
Every option position has a payoff you can draw, with a defined breakeven and a defined worst case. Learning to read the payoff — and the handful of strategies built from combining options — is what separates a considered trade from a lottery ticket.
Hedging a portfolio with derivatives
Derivatives were built to reduce risk, not to chase it. Using index futures and options to protect a portfolio through a risky patch is their oldest and most defensible use — and it has a cost you should price before you decide it is worth paying.
Straddles, strangles and trading volatility itself
Some option trades do not care which way the stock goes — only how far. Straddles and strangles are bets on movement itself, which makes them a direct wager on volatility, and the volatility crush is exactly why they so often disappoint.
Credit spreads and the iron condor
Defined-risk selling strategies collect premium while capping the loss, which makes them the disciplined alternative to naked option selling. But defined risk is not small risk, and the payoff shape hides its danger in plain sight.
Expiry, assignment and settlement
What actually happens to an option at expiry is where Indian F&O turns from theory into a bill. Physical settlement of stock derivatives, in-the-money obligations and the costs of exercise catch people who never intended to take delivery.
Put-call parity: the equation that links every option
A call, a put, the stock and a bond are bound together by one no-arbitrage equation. What put-call parity says, how it pins option prices, and what a broken parity is really telling you.
Black-Scholes: what an option is actually worth
The formula that won a Nobel Prize and priced the options market. What its five inputs are, why volatility and time dominate, and why the model is a lens, not a crystal ball.
Technical Analysis: frequently asked questions
- What is technical analysis?
- Technical analysis is the study of a stock’s price and volume history to judge the balance between buyers and sellers and the likely direction of the next move. It works from charts — trends, support and resistance, candlestick patterns and indicators such as RSI, MACD and moving averages — rather than from a company’s financial statements. In short, it addresses "when might this move" where fundamental analysis addresses "what is this worth".
- Is technical analysis useful in the Indian stock market?
- Yes, particularly for timing entries and exits and for intraday and swing trading on liquid names like the Nifty, Bank Nifty and large caps, where enough participants watch the same levels to make them meaningful. It is far less reliable on thin, low-volume stocks, and it does not tell you whether a business is worth owning. Most durable approaches use fundamentals to decide what to buy and technicals to decide when.
- Which is the best technical indicator?
- There is no single best indicator — each measures one thing, and stacking several that measure the same thing (RSI, stochastic and MACD together, say) only gives you correlated noise. A workable minimum is one trend tool such as a moving average or Supertrend, one momentum tool such as RSI, and volume for confirmation. The skill is knowing what each indicator can and cannot tell you, which is what this track teaches.
- What is the difference between technical and fundamental analysis?
- Fundamental analysis studies the business — revenue, profit, debt, cash flow and valuation — to decide what a company is worth and whether to own it. Technical analysis studies the chart — price and volume — to decide when to buy or sell and when the trend has changed. They answer different questions, and using both, fundamentals for what and technicals for when, is more robust than relying on either alone.
- Can I learn technical analysis for free?
- Yes — this entire track is free and needs no sign-up, with interactive labs for every major indicator, worked examples on real Indian stocks, and self-check quizzes. You can also practise on live NSE data in the chart workbench. Nothing is gated and there is no paid tier.