When to buy a stock, based on the chart

The entry price does more work than the exit, the position size or the story. Here is how to pick one and how to know it has arrived.

Last updated 2 August 2026

Decide the price before you want the stock

Write the buy price down while you are indifferent. Every entry rule in existence works better than the rule you invent while watching a stock run away from you, because that rule is always "buy now".

On this site the price is the level just below the floor of the stock's own fitted channel — the line its swing lows have turned at repeatedly. It is on every stock page, and the stocks currently near it are on today's swing setups.

Wait for the turn, not the level

A level alone is not an entry: price can pass straight through it and keep going. The confirmation used here is deliberately dull — price has to close above where it was five and ten sessions ago. That single condition is the difference between buying a bounce and buying a stock that is still falling, and it costs you the first few percent of every recovery. Pay it.

Know what you are being paid for the risk

Before buying, three numbers should exist: the price you will pay, the price you expect to sell at, and the price at which you accept you were wrong. If the distance to the target is not several times the distance to the exit, the trade is not worth taking however good the story is. Each stock page publishes the first two and how often comparable setups on that stock reached the target.

Four reasons not to buy, whatever the chart says

The channel fit is poor — the chart has no repeatable behaviour to trade.
The target is small. Under about 8%, costs, spread and slippage eat the edge.
Earnings or a known binary event lands inside the expected holding window.
You already own three things that will move together. Correlation is a position size you did not realise you had taken.

Buy once, or average in?

If the entry is a level you expect price to reach and possibly overshoot, splitting the purchase into two or three resting orders at progressively lower prices is usually better than a single fill — you get a lower average cost when the overshoot happens and you still own the stock when it does not. How price-based averaging in works.

Then get told when the level arrives rather than watching for it: price alerts on Telegram.