Foundations.
The vocabulary.
The concepts everything else stands on: momentum, breadth, volatility, liquidity, Sharpe, drawdown. Answer-first explainers, each tied back to how a live, rules-based system actually uses the idea rather than the textbook abstraction.
What is alpha (vs beta)? Skill, or just the market?
Beta is the return from cheap market exposure; alpha is the skill-based excess that survives a regression against a benchmark. How to tell the two apart.
What is RSI? The oscillator, not relative strength.
Wilder's 0-100 momentum oscillator: what overbought and oversold really mean, why RSI is not 'relative strength', and why it's context, not a buy trigger.
What is market breadth? What the index level hides.
Market breadth: how many stocks are actually participating in a move, not just a few mega-caps carrying the index. What it reveals, and its limits.
Do stock signals actually work?
Some stock signals work, most don't, and the difference is expectancy net of costs, reproducibility, and whether you actually follow them. How to tell.
What is momentum investing? The anomaly that shouldn't work, and does.
What momentum investing is, why the winners-keep-winning anomaly persists across decades and asset classes, and the regime-turn crash that can undo it.
What a Sharpe of 1, 2, or 3 actually means.
What the Sharpe ratio measures, what a 1 vs 2 vs 3 actually tells you, and the trade-off nobody mentions: a higher Sharpe usually means a lower return.
How breakout setups work, and why most fail.
The anatomy of a breakout, base, pivot, expansion, the mechanic behind the ones that work, and the structural reasons most breakouts fail.
How a stock signal is made, and what it is not.
A trading signal is ranked, rule-based research, not a buy command. How quant signals are scanned, scored, and ranked, and how to spot a real one.