Stock Market for Beginners

There are different kinds of crossovers that traders use to generate buy signals. I personally use moving average crossovers, price & moving average crossovers, macd crossovers and stochastic crossovers. You can easily find stocks with these patterns at http://www.dojispace.com.

MACD Crossover

Let’s look at the following stock, KHD. MACD crossover occurs 4 times on the chart, and each time the stock went up quite a bit right after.

Stochastic Crossover

Stochastic crossover works pretty well for the following stock, AMED. There were 5 stochastic crossovers for this stock, and the stock went up after the crossovers. If you look at the chart carefully, the stock seems to be more bullish when the stochastic crossover is sharper.

Again, technical analysis is all about pattern recognition. You can get in when you find a pattern that you think is profitable and get out when that pattern breaks. That’s why you need to watch a lot of stocks.  Some stocks might work out, some don’t. In the past few years, I’ve seen people lose money because they tend to hold their stocks too long even after the pattern is broken. What they did is the following

1. They find a pattern on a stock and buys it.

2. The stock drops and the pattern is broken.

3. They keep holding the stock, hoping it will go up again.

4. Their losses are getting bigger and bigger, eventually destroying their whole portfolio.

5. They decide to move on by either giving up completely or looking for other stocks.

This is not going to work. There is no magic in technical analysis and it doesn’t work all the time. You need to learn to get out of the trade when the pattern is turned against you. You may argue, “what if the stock did go up when after you sell the stock?” This happens all the time, but what if the stock doesn’t go up and goes bankrupt instead? You will lose all your money on one single stock. To win the game, you need to be disciplined instead of hoping.