Section 1: Get TradingView

TradingView offers the best tools for plotting and tracking stocks, cryptocurrencies, and macro-economic charts. From their website, “What’s TradingView? We’re a charting platform and social network used by 30M+ traders and investors worldwide to spot opportunities across global markets.”
The Rebel Economist is not sponsored nor paid by TradingView for this endorsement. They’re just really good at what they do.


Section 2: Reading Charts

Identifying Support and Resistance

Resistance and support lines can be drawn in any direction and do not have to match price points exactly – remember, you’re looking for “trends” and this is not an exact science.


Identifying Uptrends

Uptrends generally print higher-lows and higher-highs. One way to confirm an uptrend is if price can breakout from a previous resistance line.


Identifying Downtrends

Downtrends print lower-lows and lower-highs and are generally confirmed when a leg up in price fails to beat the resistance line drawn from the previous high.


Regression Lines

Regression lines are “lines of best fit”. Your chart contains several data points that are plotted on a two-dimensional space. Regression lines look for an “average” between all these points to print a general trend for you.


Candles

Line charts are easy to read, but candle charts print more detail about price action at a given timeframe.

For instance, let’s say you open up a 1-Day chart (meaning, you’re looking at prices from open to close within a 24-hr cycle).


Indicators

Relative Strength Index

The RSI or “relative strength index” quite literally measures the ‘strength’ of price ‘relative’ to the previous 14 time units/periods on an index scaled 0 to 100.

The price strength thresholds are as follows:

The RSI can be used to find buy and sell signals for entries and exits on a particular asset.