Trend Following Systems: Three Ways to Read a Trend

You pull up a chart of a stock that's clearly been climbing for months. The 50-day moving average sits comfortably above the 200-day, so your trend filter says long. Then…

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Bull Flag Pattern: How the Flagpole Defines the Setup

A stock runs 30% in six sessions, then goes quiet. The candles shrink, the volume dries up, and price drifts sideways for a week. Most traders read that stall as…

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Read more about the article VRSN +1848%: a base breakout that ran 467 days, December 1998
VRSN on the 1998-12-04 breakout entry, from my chart archive

VRSN +1848%: a base breakout that ran 467 days, December 1998

VRSN's back on traders' screens this week, popping onto Yahoo's gainers list after VeriSign's 23 July quarterly report and a raised full-year outlook. That's a fair excuse to pull the…

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Read more about the article WOLF +1876%: the silicon-carbide base breakout, October 1998
WOLF on the 1998-10-15 breakout entry, from my chart archive

WOLF +1876%: the silicon-carbide base breakout, October 1998

On 15 October 1998, a small silicon carbide chip maker closed at 4.12 and pushed above the shelf it had been building for the better part of a year. That…

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Variance Ratio: Is Your Market Trending or Reverting?

You've got a chart in front of you and a decision to make before you touch a single indicator: reach for a breakout tool that assumes the move keeps running,…

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Read more about the article APPS +364%: the base breakout that ran into 2021, July 2020
APPS on the 2020-07-30 breakout entry, from my chart archive

APPS +364%: the base breakout that ran into 2021, July 2020

Digital Turbine, which trades under the ticker APPS, is back among the most-watched names on StockTwits this week. That's reason enough to pull up its chart from the summer of…

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End-to-End Portfolio Policies vs a Simple Momentum Rule

You have two versions of the same trend system in front of you. One is a single line of code: take each market's own return series, smooth it with a…

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Mean Reversion Trading: When Fading Extremes Pays Off

A stock gaps down six percent on no fresh news, tags the lower Bollinger Band, and its 14-period RSI prints 22. Two experienced traders pull up the same chart. One…

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Read more about the article FSLR +357%: a base breakout that ran for months, March 2007
FSLR on the 2007-03-08 breakout entry, from my chart archive

FSLR +357%: a base breakout that ran for months, March 2007

First Solar's back near the top of the trending lists this week. Second-quarter results are scheduled for 30 July 2026, and there's a U.S. polysilicon trade ruling pending, both drawing…

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Read more about the article AXSM +865%: base breakout on a clinical-stage biotech, March 2019
AXSM on the 2019-03-07 breakout entry, from my chart archive

AXSM +865%: base breakout on a clinical-stage biotech, March 2019

AXSM is back on traders' screens this week, after the FDA accepted Axsome Therapeutics' filing for a new narcolepsy drug in mid-July 2026. The chart that's worth studying, though, is…

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