Quote from hels02:
You just nailed the biggest problem in the market. How do you know when you held too long and how do you know when its not long enough BEFORE the fact?
If the charts tell all, then why aren't all chartists rich? At even 10% a month, that's more than money doubling every year... why are they still charting?
Fundamentalists cannot always be right... there's ALWAYS a time lag before real company news and when media will let you know about it, usually days and weeks where those in the know got to profit.
SEC aside, if you work at a company and you hear that X company submitted a buyout offer for your company, you're not going to call your mom, your brothers and sisters, uncles and cousins, friends and neighbors and tell them to BUY NOW?
Of course you will. Times that by 95% of the employees in the company who know too. The stock is going to move. Even if there is NO broker leaks, what's the SEC going to do about the usual dozens to hundreds of company employees who hear first?
So do fundamentalists get this info? Course not.
So who knows? The people who work there and the rest of us gamble.
So how do you KNOW? You develop a sense for it and you get lucky. But no one is 100% lucky. If you're better than 50% lucky, you're doing better than that % of the other traders.