An ascending channel is not your friendly neighborhood psychic’s connection to outlandish ghosts and ghouls. Bet you don’t want to wake up and see them standing by your bed at three in the morning! (Sorry, hope we didn’t give you insomnia.)
Turning to finance: sometimes a stock can move dramatically in a single day. Big news is released and people either buy shares in droves or dump them as fast as they can. in these cases, the stock chart can look like the Cliffs of Dover...flat, then a sudden move up or down
.
Most of the time, though, stocks just bounce around day to day. General market conditions and random buying or selling spurts can cause single-session blips. But within these uneven courses, stocks tend to have an overall direction (even if that direction is sideways).
Over time, longer-term trends emerge, with a stock edging its way higher, lower or sideways. Spotting these trends involves a process called technical analysis. Basically, people and/or computers look at a stock chart and see if there are any trends.
One simple technique is to draw lines connecting the high points and low points of recent trading to form a channel. Basically, once the lines are drawn, it will look like the stock chart is bouncing around inside a tunnel. Now, it is just a matter of seeing which way that channel is pointing. If the channel is moving steadily upward, it's called an "ascending channel." If it is going down, it’s a "descending channel."
If an ascending channel is present, we will see a consistent pattern in which two parallel lines move from lower left to upper right, suggesting an upward direction in price. The lows are higher over time, and the highs are higher too.
The ascending channel is a bullish sign in that it indicates that prices are rising...and rising...and rising. (As opposed to a descending channel, which shows a bearing pattern of prices going lower...and lower...and lower). Your goal in trading an ascending channel would be to buy on a downtick in hopes that the stock continues in an ascending pattern.
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Finance: What is Breakaway Gap?7 Views
Finance a la shmoop.. what is breakaway gap? well Letterman has one yeah that but [David Letterman's front teeth appear]
here we're talking about a trading pattern like on a stock chart like this
thing where the breakaway gap is a sudden change in trading pattern like
you're walking along just fine and easily recognized in comfy double bottom
pattern like this but then blam the company reports an awesome quarter in [Stock chart dramatically rises]
the stock zooms upward outside of the pattern it goes from here to here and
well now what like there's no pattern yet so what do we do well depending on
your lean prayer might help is the stock heading down now to normalize or up more
because now everyone thinks it's the next Google and wants to own it for the
long run so breakaways go up like this and
sometimes they go down like this but either way they break away from a [Arrow points to stock charts breakaway gap]
pattern and yeah, clearly this was not the next Google! oh well
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