Technical Analysis

Technical analysis was roughly 5× more effective 30–40 years ago simply because so few people used it. Now that everyone does, the edge is gone. Same with the "bad earnings, stock holds up" signal — once widely taught, it stopped working. He calls both strategies "loved to death". He hasn't abandoned them but no longer relies on them the way he once did. The lesson: an edge exists only as long as it remains non-consensus.

At the pivot, Minervini watches real-time intraday price action — he showed the CFLT trade live, noting an early-day reversal followed by a strong close and above-average volume as signs the stock was acting fine. The critical discipline begins in the days after the breakout: he counts up vs. down days over the first 3 to 10 days to determine whether the stock is producing confirmations (acting normally) or violations (abnormal action signalling trouble). He also wants the base right side to be single-digit percentage tightness where possible, though he will give a stock slack when fundamental conviction is high — but becomes more vigilant in return.

Minervini walks through four recent positions that broke out from valid bases but then showed violation patterns: Burlington showed only 2 up days out of 6, four lower lows, and rising volume on down days. Activision showed the classic distribution pattern of low volume out and high volume in, plus closes below the 20-day and 50-day moving averages. Z-lab showed no follow-through and four to five lower lows from day one. In all four cases, the violations appeared before the hard stop was hit, providing an opportunity to reduce or exit early. The lesson: getting stopped out quickly is a feature, not a failure.

"Would you rather have it stop you out three months later and get the same loss, but then you lost three months of time?"

Before applying trend to trading decisions, Breitstein forces a precise definition: a stock in an uptrend makes higher highs and higher lows — the slope of the line is positive. Without that clarity, the concept stays vague and useless. He pushes further: even mean-reversion trades, which appear to go against the trend, can be structured to be 'with the trend' if you understand what trend means at the right timeframe. The implication is that the framework applies universally, not just to momentum plays.

The reference price is the last unaffected price before a news event or catalyst — the level from which the new trend begins. Breitstein uses it as a real-time test: if a stock is holding above its reference price, it's in an uptrend from that event; if it fails to reclaim it, the trend is down. This makes 'is the stock trending?' an objective, testable question rather than a matter of interpretation. Getting in close to the reference price with a tight stop is categorically different from entering 10 points away.

Trends don't just stop — they exhaust. Breitstein identifies the signals: capitulation volume on the flush, an extended prior move, and the setup following exhaustion where the counter-trend trade becomes viable. The GME example shows the full sequence: prolonged uptrend, exhaustion flush, then counter-trend bounce. The bigger and more extended the prior trend, the cleaner the counter-trend setup. More aligning catalysts on the flush — fundamental and technical together — the stronger the opportunity to size up.

Breitstein walks through his own trading history including a short of WorkHorse after a fraud reveal that sent the stock into sustained decline — a trend trade in disguise. He then takes a viewer question about finding mean reversion candidates: the filter is stocks down the most without news in a broadly weak market. When the market is down but a stock is hitting without a specific catalyst, the capitulation is 'clean' — pure price exhaustion rather than narrative-driven selling. A news-driven flush can also work but requires judging whether the selling is structural or temporary.

A viewer asks why Breitstein uses two-minute bars. His answer: technicals are fractals — any timeframe works — and two minutes simply fit his style as a day trader. The real question is how to locate the exact entry. He focuses on the two-bar high at the turn: the reference price just above the low after a flush. Getting in close to that structure with a tight stop is what makes a trade high-quality; entering 10 points away from the reference price is a fundamentally different — and worse — trade even if the ticker is the same.

Ryan demonstrates his rapid first-pass process live: when he pulls up a stock he's never seen, his eye goes immediately to uptrend, proximity to highs, and whether it's extended. IBM is dismissed in a fraction of a second — gap down, poor relative strength, downtrend. ASIX gets more attention: it's in an uptrend and near its high, but the base is only two weeks long, and he prefers longer bases because shorter consolidations tend to produce shorter moves. The buy point is defined by drawing a line over the majority of the base, not the absolute high. Speed in initial screening is the feature that lets you spend real analytical time only on the setups that deserve it.

Ryan explains the critical distinction between the RS rating (the 12-month percentile number) and the RS line (price performance relative to the S&P 500 plotted on the chart daily). The rating can be misleading: a stock that ran 300% and then fell 50% may still show a 99 RS rating because the prior gain dominates the calculation. The RS line shows actual relative performance direction in real time. He looks for the RS line to be making new highs alongside or ahead of price. A stock where price is still at highs but the RS line has started rolling over is already losing institutional sponsorship before the chart itself shows it — that divergence is one of his most important early warning signals.

"I put a lot more weight into how this stock is acting relative to the S&P — you can see real divergences when stocks are making new highs and the relative strength line is not."

Ryan developed an indicator he calls ANTS, measuring strings of consecutive up days with very few down days. The question it answers: what distinguishes a stock that makes a 20% move and stops from one that makes a multi-year 300%+ move? The answer he found is the buying pattern at the beginning — if a stock shows many consecutive days up without breaking the prior day's low, that is institutions executing large programs over days or weeks. A fund with three million shares to buy in a stock trading 600,000 daily can't complete the order in one session; the accumulation shows up as consistent quiet buying that pushes price higher each day. Spotting this pattern early puts the trader alongside institutional commitment through the full move.

"They have three million shares to buy and they can't get it done in a day — so the stock just keeps grinding higher."

Gon shares his screen and walks through his daily workflow. He uses Charles Schwab and ThinkTrading, primarily on 5-minute and 15-minute charts. His pre-market scan is simple: percentage movers, sorted by the largest gap-ups. No news filter, no fundamental filter — just price and volume. His ideal candidates are stocks making 4–5x their average daily volume in pre-market, regardless of the catalyst. He keeps the process clean: the setup must be visible in price and volume alone.

Host asks what on the daily chart makes an intraday setup higher quality. Gon shows the PNM chart (500% move in December 2023): the same squeeze pattern that appears intraday — demand showing up, fades getting absorbed, base forming — is visible on the daily too. When intraday and daily squeeze patterns align, two categories of trapped shorts have to cover simultaneously: those from the daily trend and those from the intraday. The resulting pressure is multiplicative. Daily confirmation is what separates a clean squeeze from a random intraday spike.

Gon walks through two more live trade examples. TPST: after an initial squeeze, the stock went sideways and formed a base rather than fading hard — he entered on the breakout of that base's high, using the base low as his stop. AVGR: same pattern — big move, sideways consolidation at a key level, squeeze continuation on a fresh catalyst. Both illustrate his recurring playbook: the continuation base after a big first move is often the better trade than the initial spike, because risk is better defined and the move that follows tends to be even larger.

Gon makes the point that when multiple setup characteristics converge on the same chart, the probability of a large move increases significantly. He shows NXTP as an example: it has prior short squeeze history (structural short interest), VCP-like volume dryup on the daily, and a bull flag pattern on the intraday simultaneously. Each setup type attracts a different buyer pool — breakout traders, squeeze traders, mean-reversion traders. When all three converge, they all enter at the same time and the move becomes exponential. Single-characteristic setups are good; multi-characteristic setups are where the outsized returns come from.

Tito walks through a Tesla setup from April 2025: a clean horizontal support level that generated a fake breakout (shakeout) which knocked him out, then a re-entry as price reclaimed the level. His options went 8-10x on the subsequent move. He covers the challenge of holding through volatility with options — progressive scaling at 25/50% rather than exiting all at once. The core lesson: horizontal price levels are his highest-conviction setups because they are universally visible, unlike trendlines where every trader draws a different angle.

"I love when it's simple on a horizontal price level. Not a trendline — everybody may not see the same trendline. Horizontal is universal."

Tito describes his Apple earnings trade: he held options while the stock 'surfed' above its 10 and 20-day moving averages in the weeks heading into the report. Apple beat and guided up after hours. He had held options overnight that initially opened down 70-80% as the gap was digested, then watched the IV explosion add fuel as the market makers repriced. The segment covers when to hold into earnings versus when to sell before the event, and how to calibrate overnight risk with options.

"Coming into earnings, this is what Kristjan Qullamaggie calls surfing on the SMAs — you're just riding a trend that's still intact all the way to the catalyst."

Tito covers two additional multi-week trades: CORE, which he held along the 10-day SMA as a sector swing, and RLB, where he bought August $40 calls on a pullback expecting a move to the mid-40s. He also discusses journaling in a private Discord channel as an accountability mechanism — writing the thesis publicly before a trade helps him commit to a plan, prevents impulse decisions, and creates a searchable review record for his weekly post-mortems.

"I write out my trade ideas in a Discord channel just for myself. It forces me to articulate the thesis before I trade it."

Tito explains a key phenomenon: option premium can diverge significantly from the underlying stock's price move, particularly in choppy or rangebound markets. He conducts a year-end review specifically at the options level — mapping back which strategy would have been most efficient for each setup. Credit spreads can generate returns even on flat price when IV collapses. Understanding when premium and price decouple is what separates an options trader who adapts from one who just picks direction.

"More traders started appreciating that the option premium just exploded — and that's something you learn over time: how to see when the setup favors the option strategy."

Tito's XLE trade illustrates his credit spread approach. XLE had ranged between 100 and 120 for four years. Using an RSI-under-40 filter to time entries near support, he bought January 2027 $50 calls for $3. XLE broke out and hit roughly $58 within a month, making the calls worth a large multiple. He contrasts what a zero-dated option would have returned — a massive discrepancy that shows why studying option pricing across expirations, not just the underlying, is essential.

"XLE had been ranging 100 to 120 for four years. January 2027 $50 calls were three bucks. XLE hit 58. The option math — that's where the real edge shows up."

Schwager worked exclusively as a fundamental analyst until he noticed that his colleague Steve Kroll, the one technical analyst in the group, was more right than wrong more consistently than anyone else. That forced him to take it seriously. The deeper insight: fundamental analysis is structurally incompatible with risk management. If you're bullish on wheat at $5 and it drops to $4.50 with fundamentals unchanged, the rational fundamental response is to buy more — exactly the opposite of what risk management requires. Technical analysis solves this cleanly: if price goes against your analysis, the analysis is by definition wrong, giving you a natural, unambiguous stopping point regardless of whether you trade with the trend or against it.

"Fundamental analysis is, in many ways, very difficult to make compatible with risk management. The more things go against you — if the fundamentals don't change — the more it would have you adding to the position. That's exactly the opposite of what you should be doing."

Schwager explains why traders have such fierce convictions that only their approach works — and why they are simultaneously right and wrong. Jim Rogers's famous line ('I never met a rich technician except those that sell their services') reflects a framework built on pure fundamental analysis that created his wealth. Bonnie Schwartz did the exact opposite: spent ten years as a fundamental analyst losing money every year, then got rich as a technician. Both are right about their own approach; neither is right about dismissing the other's. Schwager's conclusion: successful traders ultimately trade their personality. Finding an approach that genuinely fits your temperament is more important than finding the abstractly 'correct' method.

"Fundamental analysis works for Rogers. Technical analysis works for Schwarz. It goes down to being critical that every trader find an approach that works for them — and understand that people with the completely opposite approach can also make it work."

Kristjan explains his core framework: stocks that make large multi-year moves do so in a staircase pattern — a leg higher, then a sideways consolidation or pullback where the volatility contraction tightens the range, then the next step higher. The setup is to identify stocks in a confirmed uptrend building one of these bases, and to buy when the tight consolidation breaks out to the next stair. Not every stock moves this way, but the best breakout candidates follow this structure consistently enough to make it a repeatable, systematizable approach. The pattern is the same whether the stock is at $10 or $500 — it’s the structure that matters.

When asked how he scans for candidates, Kristjan is direct: scan for the strongest momentum stocks — those with high relative strength and significant recent price performance. The pattern itself cannot be automated; you have to learn to see it. What he looks for is linearity: how orderly is the pullback or consolidation after the previous leg higher? A disorderly, choppy base is a red flag; a clean, tight range that holds its structure signals institutional accumulation. He notes he now mostly trades large caps because of liquidity constraints at his size, but momentum trading in mid and small caps produced many of his best historical returns when the account was smaller.

Weinstein explains why stage analysis creates the most favorable risk/reward environment for active traders. When a stock has been thoroughly destroyed during a stage 4 decline and has since built a base, the emergence into stage 2 with moving averages beginning to turn up creates an entry where the natural stop is close and the potential upside is large. Buying into stage 3 or stage 4 reverses this equation entirely: the easy move has already been made and downside risk far outweighs remaining upside. The system's entire edge comes from entering early in the cycle, before the crowd has recognized the opportunity.

In a live walkthrough of his Global Trend Alert newsletter recommendations, Weinstein reviews both successful positions and trades that did not work — narrating exactly what he sees and why each chart passes or fails his standards. He explains how the 50-day and 200-day moving averages define the structural backbone of any stage 2 setup, how the slope of those averages indicates stage health, and what distinguishes a genuinely high-quality base from a merely acceptable one. A chart that otherwise looks like a stage 2 setup but has nearby overhead supply — prior resistance from previous highs — gets downgraded: buyers will need to work through that supply before the move can fully materialize.

"It's not an A-plus chart because you do have supply."

Weinstein walks through a series of charts to explain how gaps function as signals of institutional conviction. When a stock gaps up as it transitions from stage 1 to stage 2, confirmed by a move above its long-term moving averages, that breakaway gap is one of the strongest buy signals available. Even more powerful: when a subsequent pullback fails to fill that gap, it demonstrates that real demand stepped in and held price above that level. He notes that while roughly 90% of gaps eventually get filled, the 10–15% that do not — including a gap from 1962 on the Dow Jones that has never been filled — carry exceptional predictive power. News-driven gaps that fill quickly signal the opposite: the move lacked institutional backing.

"The 10 or 15% that don't get covered — that's a very powerful signal."

Weinstein continues the gap analysis, showing how the same gap pattern that signals a strong stage 2 entry becomes a warning when it appears in an extended stock. Using the Nvidia chart, he identifies how a third or fourth gap — appearing late in a significant move, far above the moving averages — shifts the probability from continuation to exhaustion. When that late gap is followed by a terrible close on heavy volume, the warning is clear. He explains that he trimmed Nvidia positions for clients on exactly this analysis, separating the short-term tactical view from the long-term thesis: Nvidia remains a strong company, but the technical evidence argued for reducing exposure after the exhaustion pattern appeared.

"That to me is an exhaustion gap. It's late in the move."

Weinstein walks through a series of stocks on his sell list, demonstrating the recurring patterns that signal stage 3 and stage 4 breakdowns: double tops followed by 50-day MA breaks, systematic series of lower peaks indicating distribution, and head-and-shoulders patterns that breach both the 150-day and 200-day moving averages. Each break of the 50-day MA is a warning — individually survivable but collectively diagnostic. He closes by introducing his 4B- rating: a stage 4 stock that has been thoroughly destroyed, built at least a small base, reclaimed the 50-day MA, and has room to run with no nearby overhead supply. For short sellers, the 4B- is the signal to cover; for aggressive early-entry traders, it marks the first point where a tentative long becomes defensible.

"Each one is a small warning — a warning heart attack."

Williams explains the specific experiences that laid the groundwork for his 1987 World Cup campaign. Bill gave him a long-term directional framework — reading where the market was headed over weeks and months — while Williams developed the entry mechanism himself: a volatility breakout system built around the opening price, introduced around 1982. The logic is straightforward: calculate an expected range for the day, then bracket a small distance above and below the opening. When price moves outside that bracket, enter in that direction. Williams notes that the system worked powerfully in pit-session markets but became less effective once electronic trading removed the defined opening range. He also discusses how the concept applies to stocks and swing trading setups.

"We just bracket that — a little bit above and below the opening."

Williams shares one of his most enduring beliefs: the market itself is the best teacher available, and every losing streak is a curriculum if you listen to it. Rather than blaming conditions when trades fail, he asks what the market is trying to teach him — and argues that this question, honestly pursued, will reveal the answer every time. He also pulls back the curtain on his toolbox: he has developed 35 custom indicators, and the critical principle most traders violate is that each indicator must be calibrated to the time frame and natural rhythm of the specific market being traded. Using a generic 10-day or 14-day RSI on a market with a 22-day cycle means measuring the wrong thing. Every tool in the chart must match the patterns of the market it's analyzing.

"The market's the best teacher."

Williams explains how seasonal patterns function as the primary top-down framework in his process: historical price cycles that recur with enough regularity to provide a directional bias, though not reliably in any individual year. He layers this with the Commitment of Traders report as a positioning confirmation and a mechanical trend-following system for precise entry timing. In a live chart walkthrough, he demonstrates how the entry price determines the initial stop placement, then shows how a trailing stop moves up as the position profits, eventually exiting automatically when price reverses to a defined level. He uses an example of a trade aligned with a strong seasonal pattern that played out exactly as the historical bias predicted — entry, trailing stop management, and exit all visible on the chart.

"Seasonal patterns — I look at them. They often don't follow a seasonal pattern, so you have to be careful."