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The library — issue 001

Reads, and how we read them

Concepts the dashboard quietly assumes you know — explained.

CuratorTickerStance
Items23
Lenses5
UpdatedJun 7, 2026
Featured · Concept · Trend

Market Regime

Three out of four stocks follow the broad market, so reading the regime is the single biggest risk-management lever a swing trader has. Four lenses decide it every day, not one.

8 min readRead
Zone · 01 / 02

The concepts shelf.

Methodology essays, organized by the four lenses. The page version of the dashboard's logic.

Concept

Market Regime

Three out of four stocks follow the broad market, so reading the regime is the single biggest risk-management lever a swing trader has. Four lenses decide it every day, not one.

Updated May 6 · 19 min read
Concept

Stage Analysis

Most trading mistakes are stage mistakes. Buying a Stage 4 chart hoping for a turn, holding a Stage 3 top that already rolled, missing a Stage 2 because it broke out without you. The framework Stan Weinstein published in 1988 is built around a single discipline: classify what stage a stock is in before doing anything else.

Updated May 14 · 9 min read
Concept

What a Base Is and Why Stocks Pause

Half of what a stock does is go nowhere. Those flat stretches are not dead time; they are the market resolving a disagreement about price. Learning to read a base, its depth, its length, and whether it is going quiet, is learning to read the pause before the move.

Updated Jun 4 · 6 min read
Concept

Undercut and Rally

Sometimes the cleanest tell at the bottom of a base is the moment price breaks the floor and then refuses to stay there. An undercut and rally is that failed breakdown: a dip beneath support that flushes the nervous holders, reclaims the line, and leaves the lows with less stock left to sell.

Updated Jun 5 · 6 min read
Concept

Failed Breakout

A breakout is supposed to clear the top of a base and keep going. A failed breakout does the first part and not the second: price pierces resistance, then slips back inside the range it just left. The tell is usually volume, and the reason is usually supply.

Updated Jun 6 · 6 min read
Concept

Sector Rotation

An index can drift sideways for weeks while leadership rotates underneath. Reading the rotation tells you where the setups will actually pay before the index tells you anything at all.

Updated May 6 · 20 min read
Concept

Relative Strength

Relative-strength leaders show up in the data weeks before they show up in headlines. This article covers what the metric is, where it breaks, and how the four major swing-trading schools use it.

Updated May 6 · 29 min read
Concept

Stock Leaders

Leadership is where the working setups live. Multi-horizon ranking separates real leaders from one-week news pops and tells you whether to stalk a breakout or wait for the dust to settle.

Updated May 6 · 7 min read
Concept

Episodic Pivot

Kristjan Kullamägi calls it an Episodic Pivot: a stock making a powerful gap up on news, on a day the high-to-low travel and the volume both spike. EP candidates are the names where the regime is paying attention.

Updated May 24 · 9 min read
Concept

RS in Corrections

A high RS reading in a correction often means a stock is falling less than the index, not rising. Reading the leaders board correctly during a drawdown means reading it against the regime, not in isolation.

Updated May 24 · 10 min read
Concept

Leader Watchlist

Three surfaces, three different questions. /leaders answers WHO is leading. /sectors answers WHERE that leadership is concentrating. /reads/stage-analysis answers WHEN — what part of the chart cycle each name sits inside.

Updated May 24 · 7 min read
Concept

Average Daily Range

Most stocks are too quiet to swing-trade. ADR is the one number that tells you whether a name moves enough to be worth your watchlist slot, and how wide a stop you need if it is.

Updated May 14 · 8 min read
Concept

Follow-Through Day

Bottoms feel obvious in hindsight and impossible in real time. The Follow-Through Day is the one rule William O'Neil left swing traders for telling the difference, on the day the difference is being made.

Updated May 6 · 11 min read
Concept

Distribution Days

Tops are quiet. Bottoms are loud. Distribution Days are the one rule that tries to read the change while price still looks fine, by counting the heavy-volume sell-offs the chart pretends are noise.

Updated May 14 · 8 min read
Concept

Advance/Decline Line

Indices can mask the tape. Breadth counts the stocks doing the actual work, and the A/D Line is the oldest, simplest, still-best read on whether a rally has bench depth or just three names carrying the lights.

Updated May 9 · 18 min read
Concept

New Highs Minus New Lows

When the index makes a new high, how many stocks come with it? New highs minus new lows nets the count of stocks at fresh 52-week highs against those at fresh lows. It turns the whole market's participation into one number you can read against the tape.

Updated Jun 5 · 7 min read
Concept

The Hindenburg Omen

Most breadth warnings fire when the new-low list swamps the new-high list. The Hindenburg Omen is stranger: it fires when both lists are long at the same time, in a rising market. A market splitting in two directions at once is a market losing the plot. The record says it cries wolf far more than it calls a wolf.

Updated Jun 7 · 8 min read
Concept

VIX & Volatility Regime

Most retail traders read the VIX as a one-axis fear gauge: high VIX scary, low VIX safe. The actual relationship between volatility and regime health is U-shaped. Both tails warn. The middle is where sustained trends live, and the math the dashboard uses says so explicitly.

Updated May 14 · 12 min read
Concept

Seasonality Methodology

Seasonality answers a single question: where in the calendar are we, historically? This is the formula sheet behind the /seasonality page, with every stat defined, every aggregation rule named, and the survivorship bias on the stock-level layers disclosed in full.

Updated May 23 · 9 min read
Concept

52-Week Highs and Why Proximity Matters

The crowd is taught to fear buying at the highs. The leadership schools read it the other way: a stock pressing into its 52-week high is showing demand the rest of the market has not yet earned. What matters more than a fresh high today is how close a stock sits to its high and how it got there.

Updated Jun 1 · 5 min read
Concept

Trading Above the 50-Day Moving Average

No single line decides a trade, but if you had to keep one, the 50-day moving average would be a strong candidate. Institutions watch it, and the distance between price and the line tells you whether a stock is supported or getting stretched.

Updated Jun 1 · 5 min read
Concept

Reading Volume: Dry-Ups and Surges

Price tells you where a stock went. Volume tells you whether anyone meant it. The two readings swing traders watch most are opposites that often appear in sequence: volume drying up as a base finishes, then surging as the stock breaks out of it.

Updated Jun 1 · 5 min read
Concept

Methodology

The methodology is the product. Every signal documented, every weight visible, every normalization rule explained, so you can audit (or disagree with) the regime read instead of taking it on faith.

Updated May 6 · 8 min read