What a chart cannot tell you

Everything on this site is chart reading. It is worth being clear about where that stops.

A chart is a record, not a cause

It shows what price did. It does not show why. An earnings surprise, a regulation, an exchange outage — none of that is visible until after it has moved the price.

Probabilities, not predictions

A pattern with "high reliability" is not a promise. It means that in similar situations this outcome came up more often than not. Any single instance can and will fail, and no amount of pattern knowledge changes that.

The part nobody can chart

Position size, how much you can afford to lose, whether you can sit through a drawdown without acting — these decide outcomes more than pattern recognition does, and none of them are on the screen.

So what is it good for

Reading a chart tells you where you would be wrong. That is a smaller claim than predicting, and it is the useful one.

This is for learning and is not investment advice.