What Technical Analysis Is For
Fundamentals pick the business. Technicals pick the moment.
Fundamental analysis answers one question: is this a business worth owning, and at what price? Technical analysis answers a different one: given that I want to own it, when do I act? They are not rivals. A great company can be bought at a terrible moment, and a terrible company can bounce for a month. The first question protects you from owning junk; the second helps you enter and exit without being run over. Fundamentals ask Is this business sound? What is it worth? Should I own it at all? Technicals ask Where is price now relative to its recent behaviour? Is it trending, ranging, stretched? Used together Fundamentals shortlist what to own. Technicals inform when to buy, when to add, when to leave. What a chart actually contains A price chart is a record of every transaction agreed between buyers and sellers. It is not a prediction. It is the collective footprint of everyone who has already acted, and technical analysis is the attempt to read the crowd's behaviour from those footprints. Read this section as a toolkit, not a crystal ball. The tools describe what price has done. Turning that into what price will do is the part where most people get hurt, and this section says so wherever it applies.
Part of Learn NEPSE Investing, a free course on reading Nepali company accounts and charts. Section: Charts.