| As the ticker symbols and prices whooshed past me, the traders in my office shouted buy and sell orders at me nonstop throughout the trading day. I couldn't understand how these traders made sense of the information that flew by us on our screens as they made buy and sell decisions. This was 25 years ago, when I was a newly minted trading assistant on the trading desk of a small firm, trying to hang on for dear life and figure out what the heck was going on. A short time later, a friend showed me a book on stock charts, and I was hooked. I'd found my holy grail, I thought. The charts would definitively show me which stocks would be winners and which would be losers... right? If only it were that simple. I've been studying and using stock charts and technical analysis for more than two decades. Newcomers to the concept (including myself) mistakenly think the charts are a crystal ball. They're not. But what they're extremely useful for is revealing patterns that have repeated time and time again over the years. It's fairly simple when you think about it. The stock market measures greed and fear. If a stock is going up, more people are greedy than fearful. The opposite is true when a stock falls. Charts are a visual representation of those two emotions playing out in the market. | 
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