Skill tree

How trades actually clear and what slippage really costs.

Market, limit, stop, stop-limit — when each is the right tool.

Higher highs, higher lows — and why the timeframe you pick is half the answer.

Zones, not lines — and how to trade the reaction.

The six tenets that still underpin trend-following.

Accumulation, markup, distribution, markdown.

Head & shoulders, double tops/bottoms — with Bulkowski's actual stats.

Triangles, flags, pennants, wedges. When pauses are real.

38.2 / 50 / 61.8 — the math, the psychology, and the honest stats.

Smoothing, lag, crossovers, and what they actually tell you.

The formula, divergence, overbought/oversold myths.

Signal line, histogram, and where it misleads.

%K, %D — sensitivity, divergence, and the RSI comparison.

Average True Range — the volatility unit every system needs.

Volatility envelopes, the squeeze, and why touches ≠ reversals.

Wilder's directional movement system — trend strength, not direction.

Wilder's 'stop and reverse' — a trailing-stop indicator that flips.

Two alternatives to Bollinger — ATR-based and N-day high/low bands.

Japanese 'one-glance' indicator — tenkan, kijun, senkou, chikou.

Larry Williams's inverted Stochastic variant.

Lambert 1980 — deviation from a mean + a wider range than RSI or Stoch.

The simplest momentum indicator — percent change over N bars.

Volume as the second dimension every price move needs.

Volume-weighted indicators of buying/selling pressure.

Volume-weighted average price — the institutional benchmark.

The day-trading strategy: define the first N minutes' range, trade breakouts.

Dennis & Eckhardt's trend-following system — N-day breakouts + ATR sizing.

When to fade extremes — the opposite premise of trend-following.

What a backtest actually measures — and what it misses.

Lookahead bias, curve-fitting, survivorship, overfitting.

Out-of-sample validation done right — rolling windows and randomized confidence.

Assets, liabilities, equity — the accounting identity.

Why net income lies and cash flow tells the truth about operations.

The three multiples every investor reads, and what each hides.

Schilit's red flags — when reported metrics lie.

Decomposing ROE into margin × turnover × leverage.

Fixed-fractional, Kelly, volatility-scaled — and when each works.

Win rate is a lie without average win, loss, and expectancy.

Correlation matters more than the number of positions.

Breakaway, continuation, exhaustion, area — the four gap types with real stats.

5-wave impulse, 3-wave correction, and the Fibonacci connection.

Using pattern height to project price targets — the geometric method.

Bonds, commodities, currencies — how they signal stock direction.

Sell in May, January effect, election cycles — what the data actually shows.

Advance-decline line, McClellan oscillator, new highs/lows — the market beneath the index.

VIX, put/call ratio, fear/greed — when the crowd is the signal.

Kaufman's adaptive MA and regime detection — systems that adjust to noise.

Randomized equity curves, confidence intervals, and robust strategy testing.

Calendar spreads, pairs, and relative value — hedged strategies with defined risk.

Four ways companies inflate operating cash flow — and how to catch each one.

DSO forensics, accruals analysis, free-cash-flow quality — the early-warning signals.