False Signal

Finance allah shmoop What is a chartist Well here's a

chart and here's a chart and here's a chart All

right Well these are pages from the investing bible of

a chartist A chartist is an investor really a traitor

as they tend to own stocks for a much shorter

period of time than a longer term Really invest or

type person a chartist relies solely on the patterns The

pattern's right there These are all patterns imputed by the

charts that they you know sitting poor threw for hours

and hours So check out this chart see how the

plotted data closely follows the characteristic line there The characteristic

line basically is plodded through all those dots Yes So

they're going to stare at that try to figure out

where that line is going in the future right Get

the crystal ball or all right Well let's look at

this one where the data forms what looks like Well

the head and shoulders of someone who you know doesn't

have a neck that's Just common pattern in trading And

you know if you stopped looking at it and two

thirds of the way through there it's heading down Well

Maybe you'd be short the stock for a few days

and then you see it bottoming and then you'd be

long and try to make money that way Good luck

All right len look at this chart Where is right

here where the data appears to We'll break away from

the established pattern which was all just kind of boring

Lee along down here And then suddenly everything goes up

Yeah start doing its own thing Well maybe the company

reported a good quarter or ah you know the government

cut taxes again Everything went up So these were the

tools of the chartist The chart's a chartist is the

opposite of a fundamental investor meaning that she doesn't know

or care what the company does for a living Really

she doesn't care about their p e ratio nor their

profit margins nor their debt levels on their balance sheet

nor much of anything fundamental about how their business runs

Chartist just care about the pattern they glean from the

charts and all the charts always work until they don't

And what happens when the meteor hits that is that 00:02:06.0 --> [endTime] predictable on a chart Ah