blog 2

welcome to the chart staring corner (i guess)

so you've found your way to the stock section of this website. congratulations, you've discovered where i document my ongoing relationship with red and green candles that have somehow become more emotionally significant to me than actual candles. which is probably concerning but here we are.

this is where i'll be talking about everything related to trading - stocks, options, futures, crypto, and whatever other ways the market has invented for regular people to transfer their money directly to wall street. think of it as therapy, except instead of talking about my childhood trauma, i'm explaining why i keep buying the top and selling the bottom with mathematical precision.

look, i know what you're thinking. another trading blog. because clearly what the internet needs is one more person with a robinhood account explaining why they're basically the next warren buffett. but before you click away, let me be upfront - i'm not here to sell you a course, convince you to follow my trades, or pretend i've cracked some secret code that wall street doesn't want you to know.

what you'll find here (when the markets are closed)

the plan is to write about whatever market-related chaos has been occupying my brain lately. could be anything really. maybe i'll spend two weeks analyzing how the president can tank the entire market with a single tariff tweet at 3am. maybe i'll dive deep into the existential crisis of watching spy trade sideways for six hours straight like you're literally watching paint dry, except paint drying doesn't cost you money.

some topics that might show up:

• why every youtube trading guru looks like they just discovered hair gel and green screens

• the art of pretending you meant to diamond hands while your calls expire worthless

• how tiktok day traders with anime profile pics somehow outperform your entire portfolio

• why crypto twitter influences the market more than actual economic data

• the mystery of how every earnings play becomes a "buy the rumor, sell the news" lesson

• why my stop losses get hit with sniper-like precision but my profit targets are apparently invisible

i'm not promising to make you money. honestly, if you're looking for financial advice, you should probably talk to someone with actual credentials instead of some person who gets emotionally attached to support and resistance lines.

my questionable credentials

full transparency: i am not a licensed financial advisor. i don't work for morgan stanley or have a bloomberg terminal in my bedroom. i haven't written any Important Research Reports with capital letters. i'm basically just someone who stares at charts long enough to develop opinions about them, which may or may not be based in reality.

but maybe that's actually relatable? sometimes the people writing market analysis for cnbc forget what it's like to have your entire portfolio hinge on whether tesla decides to be a car company or a meme stock on any given tuesday. or to watch your carefully planned trade get absolutely demolished because jerome used the word "concerning" in a sentence.

the trading process (aka organized gambling)

here's how this usually goes: i'll start the day with a perfectly reasonable trading plan. maybe i'll even write it down like a responsible adult. then the market opens and immediately does something that makes no sense, like gapping up because inflation was "only" 8% instead of 8.1%.

three hours later i'm deep in some rabbit hole trying to understand why vix is acting weird, which leads me to read about gamma exposure, which somehow connects to dark pools, which explains why my order filled at exactly the worst possible price. again.

then i'll spend the rest of the week obsessing over that one trade, taking screenshots of the chart like it's evidence in a criminal case, and generally becoming impossible to have normal conversations with because everything somehow relates back to why the market hates me personally.

"nice weather today, right?" "yeah, reminds me of that time spy gapped down 2% on good gdp numbers for absolutely no reason."

so yeah, that's where i'm at now.

what this isn't

this isn't going to be one of those "i turned $500 into $50,000 in three months" success story blogs. partly because that didn't happen, but mostly because those stories usually skip the part where they turned $50,000 into $200 the following month.

it's also not going to be a doom and gloom "the market is rigged and we're all screwed" situation. i mean, the market probably is rigged, but complaining about it while continuing to trade is basically the definition of insanity. which means we're all insane, but at least we're insane together.

mostly, i want to talk about the weird reality of trying to make money in markets that seem designed to separate you from your money as efficiently as possible. where you can have perfect technical analysis and still lose because some algorithm decided to dump 10 million shares at exactly your entry point. where crypto can moon because a billionaire posted a dog meme, but tank because china banned bitcoin for the 47th time this year.

the tone of this place

you've probably noticed by now that i write like someone who gave up on proper capitalization around the same time they realized the markets don't care about your feelings. this is intentional. mostly. partly because holding shift is effort, but partly because there's already enough formal financial content written by people in expensive suits who say things like "risk-adjusted returns" without irony.

this is the opposite of that. this is more like if your friend who spends too much time on trading twitter tried to explain why options pricing is basically just legalized gambling while you're both watching your portfolios bleed.

i might occasionally get excited about a trade setup and use exclamation points, but i'll try to remember that excitement in trading usually means you're about to lose money.

why you should stick around (or cut your losses)

honestly, you probably shouldn't feel obligated to read any of this. the internet has enough trading content, and most of it is either trying to sell you something or written by people who paper traded for six months and now think they understand market psychology.

but if you're the kind of person who enjoys learning from other people's mistakes, who wants to understand why the markets seem to move in mysterious ways, or who just needs someone to validate that yes, it really does feel like your broker is working against you sometimes, maybe you'll find something useful here.

i can't promise to make you a better trader, but i can promise to be honest about the wins, the losses, and the inexplicable middle ground where you somehow break even despite making every wrong decision possible.

posting schedule (market hours permitting)

you know how some trading educators post "daily market analysis every morning at 8:30am sharp"? yeah, this isn't that kind of operation. i'll post when the market does something interesting enough to write about, which could be daily during earnings season or never during those awful summer months when spy moves 0.3% for three weeks straight.

depends on how much the market makers decide to mess with retail traders that week, and how much my day job of pretending to understand technical analysis interferes with my actual research into why nothing works the way it's supposed to.

i'm thinking of this more as a trading diary than a strategy newsletter. like a weird museum where i put all the bizarre market behavior i encounter. you can visit whenever you want, maybe learn why i think dark pools are basically legal market manipulation, maybe not. no pressure.

final thoughts (before market open)

so that's the deal. this is where i'll be documenting my journey through the strange world of modern markets, one confusing chart pattern at a time. it'll probably be messy, occasionally wrong, and definitely less profitable than it should be. but maybe that's okay. maybe the internet needs more places where people can admit that trading is basically just educated guessing with fancy charts.

if you stick around, thanks. if you don't, also thanks for reading this far and good luck with your trades. either way, welcome to the chart staring section. try not to expect consistent profits, and you might be pleasantly surprised.

now if you'll excuse me, i need to go figure out why futures are acting like someone accidentally unplugged the matrix, because that seems like the kind of mystery that could keep me staring at screens until the market closes.

until next time