I may as well post the first message here and define a few basic terms.
First, if you're new to the market, a very important thing to understand is this: There are only 2 valid reasons to buy any particular stock.
1. It pays a good dividend that you feel it can continue to pay.
2. You expect to be able to sell the stock to someone else later at a higher price.
If you buy a stock to "support a company" or on uninformed but rampant speculation that it's "The next Microsoft", you've bought for the wrong reason and will learn an important lesson the hard way.
Terms:
FA: Fundamental Analysis. This is analysis of a company based on its real performance as a business and the current and likely future value of the company based on this performance, which includes many aspects such as its PE ratio compared to others in its sector, many different management effectiveness metrics, number of shares issued, institutional involvement, etc.
TA: Technical Analysis. This term describes any of a large number of methodologies for predicting future price movement based on past price movement, as well as other things such as volume. It's based on the fact that certain "rules" apply to a stock's price movement more often than not and that it's possible to, using sometimes very arcane mathematical formulas, determine future price movement with an accuracy much greater than that of random selection. No credible TA methodology claims to be accurate 100% of the time, and doesn't need to. Anything better than 50% is enough to make money.
Anyone else care to follow up? This board can be useful to newcomers even if we argue about the value of different TA methodologies or TA's value compared to FA.
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