Being a Superpower <| sep |> You made a legitimate point , and that ' s why buying figurines is a better option to support your superniche than subscribing to Crunchyroll . <| sep |> Yeah sorry but that is making a whole lot of unreasonable assumptions . For one , you assume that there was a great amount of investors who bought at that high . Without having gone tickbytick watched order book depth , there is really no way to tell . For two , you assume that the fluctuation is volatility , not direction . It is absolutely plausible that there was a fundamental change in earnings prospective , both for the up as well as for the downswing . In which case there would be no reversal , selling off or not . For three , you assume that a significantly large enough amount of investors has a time horizon that makes the swing in your chart in any way significant . Perhaps YOU have that time horizon most other investors may not they may trade anything from milliseconds quant stat funds to years insurance pension companies . Either way , they would be absolutely indifferent to the price changes you plotted . For five , you assume that other investors react at the same speed with the same tools as you , as in considering a chart and then making a human decision . The truth is that up to 60 % of vol is algos , and they have posted , traded , gone home and had dinner before you even opened that chart . If there was alpha to be gotten , believe me they ' ve eaten it way before you . The signal they leave you with is white noise , nothing more in that sense the market is ABSOLUTELY a zerosum game . Private investors simply don ' t move prices , unless we ' re talking superilliquid penny stocks , which have their own problems . For six , it absolutely positively astounds me how many technical analysts have never fired up Matlab R to plot a few discretetime brownian trajectories . You will find all of your lovely patterns there . Trouble is , it ' s just noise . As another poster remarked , humans are TOO good at pattern matching . Stare at a random pattern long enough , and you ' ll be CONVINCED you see the rule underneath . There is none , just diffusion and drift . As I said in the other post , why would ANY successful investor make his money writing investment books instead of , you know , INVESTING ? Good luck , but don ' t chase shadows .