Learn technical analysis

Start with the basics or go straight to a topic you want to understand. Lessons explain the concepts, and the app lets you put them on charts, change the settings and test what you have learned.

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The GU Analyser learning board: Market Foundations → Technical Analysis → Events Analysis → Test Your Strategy → Replicate Published Studies, drawn as 5 connected courses with reference pages branching off each, the published Test Bench studies beside Replicate Published Studies, and a progress bar on every course.
The Learning board. Large cards are courses, each with its own progress; the smaller nodes are reference pages and, beside Replicate Published Studies, the Test Bench studies and series pages. Any of them can be opened in any order.

Guides

Courses — 5 covering 50+ lessons

The courses cover the main topics. Start with the foundations, jump to a specific topic, or follow the suggested path. Several lessons open the relevant tool with the exact settings to enter.

Extend the market. The lesson How to extend the market in GU Analyser shows Premium subscribers how to connect their own free Tiingo key and take the same tools to 14,000+ US stocks and ETFs, with candlestick charts.

Market Foundations

Start here if you're new. Ten short lessons that give you the vocabulary and the mental model everything else depends on.

10 lessons · tap any one for what it covers

What a market is

How a market matches buyers to sellers, what actually makes a price move, and what the bid, the ask and liquidity mean — the mechanics every chart rests on

Markets currently available

What you genuinely own when you buy a stock, an ETF or an index, and why each one has to be read in a different context

Reading a candle

Reading the four prices packed into every candlestick — open, high, low and close — and what the body and the wicks reveal about who controlled that period

Hours, sessions and gaps

When US markets are open, why a stock can gap from Friday’s close to Monday’s open with no trading in between, and what that means for holding overnight

The real cost of trading

The three costs taken out of every round trip — spread, fees and slippage — and why a strategy that looks profitable on paper can be a net loser once they are subtracted

Investor, swing or day trader?

Choosing your timeframe before you touch a chart — investor, swing trader or day trader — because it decides which tools, risks and mindset apply, and how trouble starts when a swing trade quietly "becomes an investment"

Drawdown: the maths of losing

The arithmetic that gets least attention: lose 20% and it takes 25% to get back, lose 50% and it takes 100%. Why the cost of a deep loss grows faster than the loss itself

Position sizing

How position size decides whether being wrong is survivable — what "risk" refers to in this context, the widely cited convention of risking 1–2% of an account on a single trade, and why sizing is what lets someone sit through a losing streak with an account still intact

Realistic expectations

What real progress looks like against what gets sold as progress, why consistent results take a long learning curve, and how to recognise get-rich-quick framing before it costs you

Put it together

Putting the whole course to work: look up your first ticker and read its candles, costs and structure on a real chart

Technical Analysis

The core of the app. Four stages: read price, understand indicators, turn a setup into rules, then test and execute it — and a closing lesson on extending the market with your own data key. Two lessons complete themselves the first time you use the tools for real.

14 lessons · tap any one for what it covers

Trend, support & resistance

Reading raw price structure before a single indicator is added — how to identify a trend, and why support and resistance levels hold as often as they do

Volume: the confirmation layer

How volume is conventionally read as a confirmation layer, where higher volume behind a move is generally treated as stronger confirmation than the same move on thin volume — and what that reading can and cannot tell you

Divergence

Spotting where momentum and price start to disagree. Traders commonly treat this as an early warning that a move is weaker than it appears, and the lesson covers how often that reading holds and how often it does not

Candlestick patterns

One-to-three-bar candlestick patterns and what each is conventionally read to suggest, plus the context that is generally held to matter more than the shape itself: where on the chart the pattern appears

Chart patterns

The larger formations that take ten to fifty bars or more to build, what they are conventionally read to suggest about continuation or reversal, and why longer-forming patterns are usually given more weight

The four indicator families

The idea worth more than memorising individual indicators: all 60+ sort into four jobs. Five momentum indicators agreeing is arguably one piece of evidence counted five times rather than five confirmations

Market regimes

Why the same indicator can give opposite results in different market conditions, and how to judge whether you are in a trending, ranging, volatile or disorderly regime before choosing tools

One indicator per layer

The anti-indicator-soup framework — one indicator per layer, so that agreement between four different kinds of evidence carries more weight than agreement between four measures of the same thing

From idea to rules

Turning "buy when it looks oversold in an uptrend" into an explicit rule that can be tested — conditions joined by AND and OR, read back as a live expression such as (RSI < 30 OR MACD > Signal) AND ADX > 25

Reading backtest metrics

What a backtest scorecard actually means — the four numbers that only make sense read together, and expectancy, which combines win rate and risk-to-reward into an average historical result per trade

Running a backtest

Replaying a saved strategy across years of real history before any money is at risk — and the over-optimisation trap, where settings tuned until the past looks perfect are fitted to that history and tend not to hold up afterwards

The mistakes that cost accounts

The behavioural mistakes commonly identified behind beginner losses — none of them about picking the wrong indicator, all of them about discipline

How the tools fit together

How the tools connect: explore indicators on charts, build rules without code, backtest them, investigate what follows a market condition, and practise on historical replays

How to extend the market in GU Analyser

Adding a free Tiingo key of your own: where to get it, where it goes in the app, what it changes — a broader market, full candlesticks, the hourly indicators the built-in data holds back, deeper history — and how the free plan’s 50 requests an hour fit

Events Analysis

An event study asks one question: when this condition was true in the past, what happened around it? Eight lessons cover what the page measures, how to set a study up, what preconditions and side-by-side comparisons read, and how to tell a real pattern from an accident.

8 lessons · tap any one for what it covers

An event study measures one condition on its own

Measuring one condition on its own — every bar in history where it was true, and what price did around those bars, with no entry, exit, fee or position involved

The condition is built on its own canvas

Writing a condition in the same rule editor used for buy and sell rules, and how often a condition fires shapes what can be learned from it

Setting the study up

Choosing the windows either side of the trigger, why a snapshot counts bars rather than days, and the three ways a study can be run across tickers and conditions

Preconditions and side-by-side comparisons

What trend, volatility, squeeze and prior move read, and which one uses the future

Isolated and clustered events

Whether the condition fired once, or kept firing

Reading the figures

Reading the figures around the trigger, what the shaded band does and does not claim, and how the indicator panels reveal whether a rule fired where it was meant to

Reading the table

What each column measures — price change, speed, volatility, volume measured against that instrument’s own normal, share rising, worst dip, the extremes, and the worst tenth of cases

What makes a result trustworthy

The four event counts and why they differ, how clustered dates inflate an apparent sample, what a confidence interval containing zero means, and the limits of the method

Test Your Strategy

Two questions answered end to end with the app: does buying on RSI alone actually work, and how do you build a screen that combines indicators properly?

11 lessons · tap any one for what it covers

How to test a claim

The four steps behind testing any trading claim — state it precisely, express it as rules, run it on history, then read the result honestly

Case 1 · See it on a chart

What an RSI reading below 30 actually looks like on a real chart, and why "oversold" is not the same as "about to go up"

Case 1 · Write the strategy

Turning "buy when RSI is oversold" into exact buy and sell rules a backtest can execute — the point where a claim becomes testable

Case 1 · Test it on four stocks

Running one RSI strategy across four different stocks, because a result from a single chart over a single period is not evidence

Case 1 · Read the verdict

Reading a backtest result properly — return against drawdown, win rate against the size of the losses, and what the equity curve shows that a summary number hides

Case 1 · Fix it and re-test

Adding a single trend condition to the same strategy and re-running it, to see how much one rule changes the outcome

Case 1 · Now try your own

Four questions about indicators worth putting through the same test yourself, on tickers you pick

Case 2 · Build a real screen

Building a stock screen from four indicators that each answer a different question — trend, momentum, volatility and volume — rather than four that repeat one another

Case 2 · Verify, save, then test

Checking a screen against the charts, saving it, then backtesting it — and why a screen produces a shortlist to investigate, never a decision

Case 2 · Now try your own

Four more screens worth building, and how to tell whether yours is too loose or too tight

The seven questions

The seven questions worth answering before risking anything — and the eighth question nobody can answer, which is how you spot who is selling something

Replicate Published Studies

Every Test Bench study states its method so it can be rebuilt. Three lessons cover the approach: why rebuild, what to copy out of an article, and how to define a benchmark. The first studies each have a lesson with the complete rebuild on the real screens; later studies end with their rebuild steps on the study page in the app, and studies on one subject are collected on a series page.

11 lessons · tap any one for what it covers

Why rebuild a published test

A result you can reproduce is evidence; one you cannot is a claim

Read the method before the result

The six things to copy out of any study

Define a benchmark

A result means nothing until you say what it is being measured against

Study 001 · Donchian breakouts

The complete rebuild: custom indicators, both rules, the run, and the benchmark

Read the study this rebuilds →

Study 002 · MACD crossovers

The complete rebuild: the event, the zero-line split, and the check the study turned on itself

Read the study this rebuilds →

Study 003 · The conditioned comparison

Study 002's event inside one trend and volatility combination at a time

Read the study this rebuilds →

Study 004 · Crossover sharpness

One derived signal, ANDed into the crossover

Read the study this rebuilds →

Study 005 · Opening range breakout

A 15-minute range, a whole-candle entry and a partial exit, on 5-minute candles

Read the study this rebuilds →

Study 010 · The VWAP rule

Long above the session VWAP, out below it and at 16:00, on 5-minute candles

Read the study this rebuilds →

Study 015 · Four RSI entries, one rule

Buy a dip above the 200-day average, sell after the first close above the 5-day average

Read the study this rebuilds →

Study 020 · Three moving-average rules

Hold while the fast line is above the slow one, sell at the next open when it drops below

Read the study this rebuilds →

Published studies by subject: MACD Crossover Studies · Opening Range Breakout (ORB) Studies · Candlestick Pattern Studies · VWAP and Anchored VWAP Studies · Mean Reversion Strategy Studies · Moving Average Strategy Studies · all studies on The Test Bench.

Reference library — 18 sections

Pages to read alongside the courses and to come back to. Grouped below by the course they sit closest to, as the map draws them; published Test Bench studies sit beside the course that rebuilds them.

Alongside Market Foundations

Scam Protection

How trading scams work and how to recognise them: Ponzi schemes, signal sellers and paid “gurus”, pump-and-dumps, managed-account and credential theft, and high-cost courses and mentorships — with the red flags they share and how to verify a broker or platform.

Market History

Eight major market events, their drawdowns and recovery periods: the 1929 Wall Street Crash, Black Monday, the dot-com bust, the 2008 financial crisis, the COVID crash, the GameStop squeeze and the inflation bear market.

Who's Who

The investors worth knowing about — Charles Dow, Benjamin Graham, Jesse Livermore, Warren Buffett, Peter Lynch, George Soros, Jim Simons, Ray Dalio — and the people who invented the indicators in your charts panel: Wilder, Bollinger, Appel, Lane, Donchian, Keltner, Chaikin and others, with what each was arguing.

Common Mistakes

Eight common errors involving risk, stops, over-optimisation and trading discipline — indicator soup, fighting the trend, moving a stop loss, chasing on FOMO, revenge trading, poor risk-to-reward, ignoring the regime and over-optimisation — each with a specific fix.

Trading Psychology

How emotions, discipline and loss tolerance can affect decisions: fear, greed, and why a plan made at the weekend gets abandoned on Tuesday morning.

Fundamentals

An introduction to earnings, valuation and balance sheets, and what a company's numbers show that price and volume do not.

Alongside Technical Analysis

Core Concepts

Candlesticks and OHLC, support and resistance, telling a trend from a range or a chop, timeframes and why they disagree, volume, divergence, moving averages, chart patterns and the basics of risk.

Market Regimes

The four market regimes — trending, ranging, high volatility, and bear or capitulation — how to recognise which one you are in, and which indicators behave differently in each.

Indicators

A page for every one of the 60+ indicators in the app: what it measures, the thresholds conventionally treated as meaningful, the conditions where it is considered more or less useful, which indicators it is normally read alongside, and its known limitations. Free to read outside the app, with no account needed.

Pattern Gallery

Eight candlestick patterns drawn out bar by bar — doji, hammer, shooting star, bullish and bearish engulfing, morning and evening star, and the inside bar — with what forms each one, what it is conventionally read to mean, and how reliable that reading is.

Alongside Events Analysis

Setting Up an Event Study

Build the condition on its own one-terminal canvas, then configure the study: pooled instruments, history, horizons, preconditions and side-by-side comparisons.

Alongside Replicate Published Studies

Study 001 · Do Donchian Channel Breakouts Actually Work?

Three classic breakout rules tested across 179 US stocks, with Buy & Hold comparisons, fees, drawdowns, ADX and different market conditions.

Read the study → · The lesson that rebuilds it

MACD Crossover Studies

A series of event studies on the MACD signal-line crossover in US large-cap stocks: what follows a crossover, whether the benchmark it is measured against is fair, and whether the size of the crossover carries information of its own.

Read the series page →

Study 002 · What Happens After a MACD Crossover?

15,698 bullish MACD signal-line crossovers across 197 US large-cap stocks, 2018 to 2026, measured over the following 35 trading days against the same measurement taken from every trading day in those stocks.

Read the study → · The lesson that rebuilds it

Study 003 · A Stronger Benchmark for the MACD Crossover

Study 002 compared MACD crossovers with every trading day. A reader asked if that was fair, so we re-ran the test only against days with similar trend and volatility, with a calendar-block bootstrap interval on each crossover-minus-comparison difference.

Read the study → · The lesson that rebuilds it

Study 004 · Do Sharper MACD Crossovers Lead to Better Returns?

Not every MACD crossover crosses by the same amount. We measured the size of the one-day histogram move, scaled it by the share price, and tested whether sharper crossovers were followed by larger 35-day returns — with one threshold fixed in advance and applied once to data it had not seen.

Read the study → · The lesson that rebuilds it

Opening Range Breakout (ORB) Studies

The opening range breakout explained — how the range is set, entries, stops, targets and the common variants — with our backtests of it on large US stocks after trading costs.

Read the series page →

Study 005 · Does the Opening Range Breakout Actually Work?

One 15-minute opening range breakout rule on 149 large US stocks over six months of 5-minute candles: the result per trade, as a portfolio, at four trading costs, and its strongest and weakest stocks.

Read the study → · The lesson that rebuilds it

Study 006 · Does Gap and Go Work? The Opening Range Breakout on Gap Days

Gap and go tested on 149 US stocks over six months: ORB trades on gap-up, flat and gap-down days, and whether the breakout added anything to the gap.

Read the study →

Study 007 · Does the Price Feed Change a Backtest?

One ORB rule on SPY run on two platforms’ 5-minute data: why backtest results change with the price feed, and how to separate the rule from the data.

Read the study →

Candlestick Pattern Studies

Candlestick patterns explained, starting with the bullish and bearish engulfing, with our tests of what followed them on weekly candles in US large-cap stocks.

Read the series page →

Study 008 · Does the Bullish Engulfing Pattern Work? A Weekly Test

Across 480 current S&P 500 companies, the weekly bullish engulfing underperformed ordinary weeks by 0.80 percentage points over the next 12 weeks.

Read the study →

Study 009 · Does the Bearish Engulfing Pattern Work? A Weekly Test

Across 480 current S&P 500 companies, the weekly bearish engulfing showed almost no difference from ordinary weeks.

Read the study →

VWAP and Anchored VWAP Studies

VWAP and Anchored VWAP explained: the calculation, the anchors and a published VWAP trading rule, with our tests of that rule on QQQ, on large US stocks and after trading costs.

Read the series page →

Study 010 · VWAP Trading Strategy Backtest: Does the QQQ Result Generalise?

The long side of a published VWAP rule rebuilt on QQQ, then tested after the study’s years, on 149 large US stocks and against trading costs.

Read the study → · The lesson that rebuilds it

Study 011 · Does the VWAP Strategy Beat Buy and Hold After Trading Costs?

How much each trade can cost before the long-only VWAP rule falls behind buying and holding QQQ, and where spreads, fees and currency conversion sit against that.

Read the study →

Mean Reversion Strategy Studies

Mean reversion trading explained: why prices revert, the entry and exit rules and the risks, with our tests of RSI, RSI(2), ConnorsRSI and Stochastic RSI signals on S&P 500 stocks and a backtest of the four.

Read the series page →

Study 012 · Does RSI(2) Work? Oversold and Overbought Tested on S&P 500 Stocks

RSI(2) crossing 10 and 90 on 483 S&P 500 stocks, 2006 to 2026: 4 of 8 signal tests differed clearly from ordinary days over the next 5 days.

Read the study →

Study 013 · Does RSI Work? RSI 30 and 70 Tested on S&P 500 Stocks

RSI(14) crossing 30 and 70 on 483 S&P 500 stocks, 2006 to 2026: 3 of 8 signal tests differed clearly from ordinary days over the next 20 days.

Read the study →

Study 014 · Does ConnorsRSI Work? 10 and 90 Tested on S&P 500 Stocks

ConnorsRSI crossing 10 and 90 on 483 S&P 500 stocks, 2006 to 2026: 4 of 8 signal tests differed clearly from ordinary days over the next 5 days.

Read the study →

Study 015 · RSI Mean Reversion Backtest: Which RSI Entry Works Best?

Four RSI entries under one dip-buying rule (above the 200-day average, out on a close above the 5-day average) on 483 S&P 500 stocks, 2006 to 2026, against buying and holding.

Read the study → · The lesson that rebuilds it

Study 016 · Does Stochastic RSI Work? 20 and 80 Tested on S&P 500 Stocks

Stochastic RSI crossing 20 and 80 on 483 S&P 500 stocks, 2006 to 2026: no clear difference from ordinary days over the next 10 days in any of 8 signal tests.

Read the study →

Moving Average Strategy Studies

Moving average trading explained: SMA and EMA, crossovers, the golden cross and the 200-day average, with our tests of three rules on S&P 500 stocks and a backtest of the three.

Read the series page →

Study 017 · Does the Golden Cross Work? Golden and Death Crosses Tested on S&P 500 Stocks

Golden and death crosses on 483 S&P 500 stocks, 2006 to September 2026: no clear difference from ordinary days over the next 100 trading days in any of the four signal tests.

Read the study →

Study 018 · Does the 200-Day Moving Average Work? Price Crossings Tested on S&P 500 Stocks

Price crossings of the 200-day average on 483 S&P 500 stocks, 2006 to September 2026: no clear difference from ordinary days over the next 100 trading days in either of the two signal tests.

Read the study →

Study 019 · Does the 9/21 EMA Crossover Work? Tested on S&P 500 Stocks

The 9/21 EMA crossover on 483 S&P 500 stocks, 2006 to September 2026: no clear difference from ordinary days over the next 20 trading days in any of the four signal tests.

Read the study →

Study 020 · Moving Average Crossover Backtest: Golden Cross vs 200-Day vs 9/21 EMA

The golden cross, the 200-day average and the 9/21 EMA as trading rules on 483 S&P 500 stocks, 2006 to September 2026, with next-open fills and costs, against buying and holding.

Read the study → · The lesson that rebuilds it

Alongside Test Your Strategy

Build a Setup

How to assemble a coherent setup: a position-sizing calculator, a four-layer framework separating trend, momentum, volatility and risk, and example stacks to take apart and modify.

Strategy Builder Blocks

Every unit on the builder palette, drawn as it appears on the canvas — what each one does, a worked example, and where it is allowed to wire.

Building Strategies

How to write buy and sell rules precisely enough for a computer to follow, without code: the shape of a single condition, what each operator means including crossovers, comparing an indicator against a number or against another indicator, and how AND/OR groups resolve the ambiguity in a rule like “A and B or C”.

Using the Tools

A walkthrough of Charts, Screening and the indicator Configuration — one concrete task each, the exact values to enter, and what you should see when it has worked.

Setting Up a Backtest

Real screenshots of the current screens: pick or build a strategy, then configure Mode, Run over, Period, cash and fees before you run it.

App Manual

Where everything lives: getting started, each tool in depth, and an example workflow from looking up a stock to reading a finished backtest.

Our Intent & Values

What this app is for, what it refuses to be — no signals, no alerts, no recommendations — and how it treats your data and your money.

Learn it. Then investigate it.

Lessons explain what a concept or indicator measures. Charts let you explore it on historical data. Strategy Builder and Backtesting let you turn an idea into rules and test them without code. Event Analysis lets you examine what happens around a defined condition.

The indicator reference is open to everyone

The Indicators section above is also published outside the app, with no account needed: a page for every indicator in GU Analyser covering what it measures, how its readings are conventionally interpreted, the levels people use, and where it is known to fall short. Start at the technical indicator reference, or go straight to a common one — RSI, MACD, Bollinger Bands or ADX.

And the rules themselves get tested

Lessons explain indicators and concepts. The Test Bench examines specific market claims using defined methods and historical data. Published studies show the question, the assumptions, the comparison and the result.

Studies on one subject are also collected on a series page: MACD Crossover Studies · Opening Range Breakout (ORB) Studies · Candlestick Pattern Studies · VWAP and Anchored VWAP Studies · Mean Reversion Strategy Studies · Moving Average Strategy Studies.

What it costs

All 50+ lessons and every reference section are free. The free plan also runs the tools on the S&P 500 ETF (SPY), with the screener on the Magnificent 7. Premium widens the same tools across 400+ US stocks, ETFs and indices — see pricing.

Start for free →

Plot it yourself. Add this indicator to a chart, change every parameter and watch the line move, then backtest how the rule would have behaved on historical data — free on the S&P 500 ETF, no card.

Create a free account or start with the lessons →
This is reference material, not advice. It describes what each indicator measures and how its readings are conventionally interpreted. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell anything, and no indicator predicts future prices. GU Analyser is an analytical tool — no money is ever traded here.