Learn · Put it together · 11 of 11

Reading the checks together

A dramatic price move hijacks the eye. Predict how many of seven checks a real chart passes, then tally them one by one — the discipline of reading them all, not just the loudest.

You’ve learned every check on its own. The final skill is reading them all at once — and not letting the loudest one lie to you.

You've met each check on its own — trend, momentum, pullback, relative strength, market regime, overextension, volume. The last skill is reading them together, and it takes real discipline, because your eye cheats. A dramatic price move shouts so loud you stop counting the quiet checks — and the quiet ones are exactly where the story hides.

Before you tally anything, your gut will have decided "strong" or "broken" from the price alone. Test it on the real charts below: predict how many of the seven checks actually pass — Few, Some, or Most — then watch them count up one by one.

The trap is baked in: a stock up 37% can pass only some checks (overextended, running on heavy volume), while one down 19% can still pass some (it pulled back to support in a market that hadn't turned). No single check decides it — the tally is just how many independent conditions happen to line up.

That gap — between what the chart shouts and what the checks actually say — is the whole point. The discipline is counting all of them, every time, instead of letting the loudest one speak for the rest.

These seven are the public chart-reading skills this course teaches; you can tally them on any chart yourself. (screenmytrade runs its own daily scan across the S&P 500 — the exact rules are in the methodology — but reading the checks as a group is yours regardless.)