Skip to content
AmiBroker TA Course

Market and Technical Analysis Foundations

Every chart you will study in this course is a picture of transactions that real people and real machines agreed to make. Before you can judge whether a line drawn across that picture means anything, you need to know what produced the picture: who was trading, what each of them was trying to achieve, what it cost them to trade, and what the printed number actually represents.

That is what this part is for. There is no software here and no code. Six short lessons build the vocabulary and the mental model that everything else depends on, and the last of them sets out the method the whole course follows.

Why this part exists

Section titled “Why this part exists”

Most technical analysis material starts at the chart. Starting there leaves you unable to answer questions that decide whether your later work is worth anything:

  • Why does a backtest that looks excellent on a thinly traded share tell you almost nothing?
  • Why is the same two per cent move unremarkable in one instrument and extraordinary in another?
  • Why did the price you were filled at differ from the price you saw when you clicked?
  • Why is “the market thinks” a phrase that quietly smuggles in an assumption?

None of those are advanced topics. They are foundations, and readers who skip them tend to produce beautiful research that answers a question nobody asked.

What changes for you

Section titled “What changes for you”

By the end of this part you should be able to:

  • describe, step by step, how an instruction to buy becomes a printed price;
  • use the words bid, ask, spread, depth, liquidity, volatility and base rate precisely, rather than as atmosphere;
  • explain what technical analysis claims, in a form specific enough that the claim could turn out to be false;
  • state the difference between forecasting a price and describing a distribution of outcomes;
  • run the course’s research loop in your head, from a hypothesis to a recorded decision.

That last one matters most. The loop introduced in the final lesson — Hypothesis, Rules, Test, Evidence, Risk, Decision — reappears in every lab, project and reality check in the remaining thirty-six parts. It is worth learning properly the first time.

What you need first

Section titled “What you need first”

Nothing. No AmiBroker installation, no data subscription, no brokerage account, no programming background. Part 3 installs the software; Part 8 starts the programming. This part needs only attention and a willingness to treat confident claims as claims rather than as facts.

If you already trade, do not skip ahead. The lessons on liquidity and on probability are the two that most often change how an experienced discretionary trader reads a backtest, and they are the two that the entire research half of this course leans on.

How to read it

Section titled “How to read it”

Read the six lessons in order; each one uses the previous one’s vocabulary. Attempt the quiz questions before revealing the answers — they are written to test whether you can apply an idea, not whether you can recall a definition. Where a lesson points forward to a later part, that is a promise the course keeps, not a way of avoiding the subject.

One habit to start now: whenever you meet a statement about markets in this part or anywhere else, ask what evidence would settle it. If nothing could, it is not a statement about markets.

Part1 of 36Level1 — Chart ReaderPages6Estimated time2.2 hours

0 / 6 lessons in this part completed