Replies to post #326477 on Anavex Life Sciences Corp (AVXL)

[mike_dotcom]

Can you tell us how low it's going today?

[jbcan07]

Tom TA supposedly relates investor sentiment to price points (IMU/O). Those wanting to explore this notion can read Avi Gilburt's frequent expressions on this matter. And I would imagine you can share any number of classic references about the psychological underpinnings of TA. I don't practise this black art and anyway don't trade in and out enough for TA to be very relevant.

Fact is whether day trading (LBSR?), swing trading over a few weeks (Leo?) or in my case usually > 1 yr swings, everyone needs a method to decide at which price points to pull the trigger. If TA works for you, great. Or there's the magic eight ball. I tend to buy when the integration of available info. suggests the market is exaggerating the bear case. I do like the flat bowl shape in the charts for initiating new position. So far with AVXL my entries have been relatively efficient. On the other hand I have not bought since the winter of 2018.

To sell I set profit objectives. On a new spec. position, the objective is typically to cover the cost of the purchase by selling maybe half to a third of the shares into a run up at such time that this happens. My initial position in AVXL 2015 came about due to a flat bowl that developed. As the impending uplisting pushed SP up, the SP met this objective and I sold a third of the shares. However this sale came a few weeks before the huge impulse in the fall and in retrospect this sale left a potential 15 bagger on the table. Oh well at least the objective was met. A sale in March 2020 caught close to the peak of that impulse. Sales this year have caught as little as a third of the peak to maybe 80%.

The point of the story is that estimating the eventual culmination point of these impulses in advance, in my experience, is much more difficult than recognizing a grind down into a decent buy point. As with my spec mining stocks, spec biotech TA may have some utility for run-of-the-mill price points but it hard to see the prediction of the magnitude of a large impulse driven by news or other factors.