The time has finally arrived to simplify how we use the volume indicator on our charts. With a Tradingview script at the end, here is a thread🧵 on what “simple” volumes are, & how to use them: 👇

Sold this IPO breakout. Then it went to new highs. Did I exit too early? 👇

Market Quadrant 39/2026 A hard-money environment with choppy conditions overall. Selective stocks still working but require considerable effort & luck, & that makes it undeserving for traders to risk any serious money here. Looking at the big winners of the past few months, you will definitely come across some stocks that move as if they don't care about anything happening in the market. If you can catch them, your system probably isn’t dependent on market conditions. But most likely, you would have to bear significant losses to catch that one needle in a haystack, and I think that’s not worth the effort for the majority of us. Just as a thirsty person in the desert longs for a single drop of water, that’s exactly the situation swing traders in Indian markets are finding themselves in again & again. They get excited over the smallest of upswings, jumping at the first sign of strength and calling it the start of the mother of all bull markets. But the reality is that Indian markets, for quite some time, have been unworthy of swing trading and only good for intraday trades, preferably in freshly listed IPOs or quick momentum bursts of a couple of days, without the expectation of holding anything, or anything remotely resembling trend following. ⦿ Bias → Bear From a long-term perspective, we remain in a bear market, as more than 50% of stocks stay below their 200-day SMA. ⦿ Trend → Sideways The 52-week Net New Highs have not yet remained consistently positive or negative for the past 3 days. Most stocks have consistently remained below their 50-day MAs. ⦿ Swing → Downswing The MBI is now red, and most stocks are trading below their 10-day moving averages, so we are in a downswing now. ⦿ Momentum → Negative & worsening No index has positive & improving momentum. Pharma is the only index with positive (but worsening) momentum. That's all for this week.

Here's a TradingView indicator that automatically plots a horizontal ray from a specified date on all your charts, so you don't have to do it manually. tradingview.com/script/orqI6…

Last week, we had a big red day followed by a long-tailed shakeout candle and two days of bullish follow-through. If we look at the indices, they are yet to close above the high of the big red day, that is, 15 September. One of the easiest ways to find relative strength over the past 4 days is to look for stocks that follow the same structure but with their last price closing above the big red day. And to avoid randomness, choose the names in which the shakeout provided an opportunity for them to retest the base breakout.

Market Quadrant 38/2026 Market conditions at the end of this week are almost the same as last week, where the breadth sucks, but the watchlist feedback is quite the opposite. What changed was a shakeout at the start of the week, which forced most short-term swing traders to go all-in cash, only to re-enter fresh names over the last few sessions. With the indices down, this is a good time to build a watchlist of stocks showing strong relative strength. Trade with the awareness that breadth is poor and the upswings are on shaky ground. Let your journal guide you first; breadth is a far second. ⦿ Bias → Bear From a long-term perspective, we remain in a bear market, as more than 50% of stocks stay below their 200-day SMA. ⦿ Trend → Sideways The 52-week Net New Highs have not yet remained consistently positive for the past 3 days. Most stocks have consistently remained below their 50-day MAs. ⦿ Swing → Neutral The MBI briefly turned red, then returned to green by the end of the week, with the last session posting 400+ 4.5R numbers. Most stocks are trading below their 10-day moving averages. ⦿ Momentum → Negative but improving Pharma & Metals are the only indices with positive & improving momentum. That’s all for this week.

from 100% invested to all-cash today

Try this. Use the new 'Move tables to bottom panel' option to move a table from within your scripts to the Pine Tiles bottom panel below. Saves the space on the charts & can be minimised when not needed.

Market Quadrant 37/2026 Ever since I started writing the market quadrant in 2021, I’ve never witnessed the irrelevance of market breadth as I’m now seeing in the current markets. Take this: we are in a bear market, as most stocks are below their 200 SMA. Net new highs have been negative for the past 2 consecutive days, so one more day & they’ll be red. Most stocks are below their 50-, 20-, and 10-day moving averages. Momentum scores are negative. Sounds gloomy, right? And what are swing traders doing? Sitting out? No. They are busy entering sound stock structures. Breakouts are reasonably sustained. IPOs are working, with many hitting upper circuits, and many traders are executing trades successfully. We can say that this is a stock-pickers’ market, and maybe we all, or most of us, are picking the right stocks. So, what has happened? Do we no longer need the support of the market, or have we become so used to the bear market that we are now better stock pickers, functioning even better than we used to be? Maybe the most plausible explanation could be that a certain pocket of stocks is working, and that is the same pocket, or the same collection of stocks, that we see setups in. This includes young IPOs as well. I’m not saying that the market is so super-easy that you can just blindly get in anywhere and any stock will just run away. The market has its fair share of shakeouts and delays in movement, but we can't overlook the fact that certain stocks common on most traders’ watchlists are doing wonderfully well. Only two kinds of traders are not currently making money: 1. Traders who blindly look at market breadth and indices and decide that the overall participation of the market is so poor that they should voluntarily sit out of the market. They don't even bother to scan or check their watchlists and take feedback from there. 2. Traders who are still entering the stocks at relatively extended positions because they are not considering the inherently choppy market breadth conditions at all. Either they are taking trades away from the moving averages, and/or their stock selection has scope for improvement. So, overall, the market breadth is very poor, but still, most swing traders, most of us, are comfortable trading and making money because we are focusing on our watchlist feedback and our portfolio results. Till this dichotomy or this divergence continues, all we have to do is just keep an eye on the breadth and see if it stays in this current zone. If it does, then maybe we can continue doing this for another week or so. If breadth worsens too much, then yes, the pocket of stocks that are working will ultimately stop, and we’ll have to stop there. This is not a judgment call for us to make. The watchlist and portfolio will guide us there. If this happens for a long, long time, then maybe I will no longer need to write the market quadrant anymore, because as of now, we are witnessing the irrelevance of market breadth, and it’s really something to ponder over this long weekend (Monday is a holiday). p.s. A more sober version of this text could be read on the blog here: finallynitin.substack.com/p/…

LALITHAA - exited today for about a 6% return on portfolio Had a 30% size with about 1% risk on portfolio. Exited partial quantity midway & the remaining quantity today. The first entry was a bit premature, I feel. The second entry was perfect. It was on the lowest volume since IPO with a narrow range inside bar near IPO base highs. Tomorrow it has earnings, but I had a good cushion & could've held a partial quantity through earnings, but the price band change to 5% made the sell decision much easier.

How to quickly check if a stock is liquid? (for beginner swing traders) ❶ The first step for checking for liquidity should be to train their eyes to identify well formed candlestick structures on the daily chart. This means candlesticks with easily identifiable open, high, low & close, and no 'jumps' or 'cuts' between candlesticks other than the usual gap ups or gap downs. ❷ The second step would be somewhat subjective to each with regards to one's account size. Here we look at the average turnover (available in the Simple volume script), that is average price * average volume. A simple rule of thumb is that the average turnover should be > 20-25 times of max position size one intends to build. So, for example, Trading capital = 1 Cr (suppose) Max size = 25% = 25 lakh Avg vol * Avg Price should be > 20 times of max size 20-30 times of max size = 5 Cr The best is to err on the higher side and consider an average turnvover of >10Cr as tradable in Indian stocks. And if your account size is bigger, then this value further increases. ❸ The third & the final step is to have a look at the 3-minute or 1-minute chart again for the well formed candlestick structures with no frequent 'jumps' or 'cuts' between candlesticks. If this step also passes, then you can label the stock as liquid (or tradable). All this sounds too much in words, but once you get in the flow, it is just a glance-on-the-chart and you'll instantaneously know if the stock is illiquid.

kho na jaaye yeh, taare zameen par

How come I'm well invested in a hard-money environment? Firstly, understand this: - A no-money market environment is one in which you will not trade at all. - In an easy-money environment, you'll freely trade & will not even hesitate to go on margin. Now, a hard-money environment is one where you've to decide participation & allocation based on feedback from your watchlist & your portfolio. Here you must have some sort of rule of either xx% drawdown or xx consecutive losses, where you'll reduce your size &/or frequency of trading. And then a certain level beyond which you'll sit out for xx days. Read this carefully: If you ever have to choose between the market environment & your watchlist/portfolio feedback, go with your watchlist/portfolio feedback. You're seeing only my 4 biggest winners. Suppose my win rate is 40%. This means for every winner, I have 2-3 small losers too, which means easily 8-12 losers here, which, since I've conveniently chosen not to showcase, you'll have to extrapolate. When my watchlist feedback was good, I took my chances & was able to get hold of some good names, & am in overall profit as of now. I have the utmost respect for traders who post live trades. SEBI permitting, that's the correct way to share trades. But I barely get time in the live market to execute; what to talk about posting? Also, posting them hurriedly would mean that the charts wouldn't look beautiful & would be unannotated. I don't like that. So I post snapshots from time to time, just as proof of trading & not to sell a course/product. This is just so that people don't question that "आप trade तो करते नहीं हैं, बस ज्ञान देते रहते हैं" 🙈 😁 The last 12 closed trades are attached to this post, so you can see how unpredictable it is to say which trade will emerge as a big winner.

Buying within the base, as close to the moving averages as possible, is what I've been doing these days. I find this approach less stressful for laidback traders like me.

Portfolio Snapshot The portfolio is currently 73% invested in 4 stocks, with 0% open risk. Some positions have been partially booked.

"Crowded trades are only an X concept." Yes, most likely, yes, I agree with this. Actually, the problem is that you can never properly understand these kinds of myths or concepts. Because until you have an evidence to prove something or to establish the existence of something, you can neither deny it nor confirm it. I think we fintwit traders mainly have a condition like that of a frog in a well, where we start treating that entire well as our world and don't really understand what exists outside it. 🐸 So we see ten traders posting the same charts and think, "Probably everyone is interested in this stock at this level." And then we assess that this stock, for this particular day or this particular entry level, is crowded. But there is no way to measure how many of those traders posting the charts are actually taking the trade, or whether they have enough capital to actually influence the stock at that price. We are simply making an assessment based on the limited information available to us. And what is a trader who isn't on X doing? He doesn't even look at all this. He's not there in that world. He's simply looking at a stock, seeing a setup, and saying, "There is a setup here, and I will enter at this level." Now, he can imagine, "If I'm seeing this, other people must be seeing it too. And If everyone else is seeing it, maybe I shouldn't even attempt this setup because it's crowded." And then he can take that one step further and say, "A lot of people will think that everyone is interested in this stock, so they won't enter because they think it's crowded. And the moment they don't enter because they think it's crowded, the stock becomes un-crowded again." There is no end to such speculation. And I don't think this kind of thought process deserves any weight in a trading strategy. So, are some trades actually crowded? And if they are, does that have any impact on their outcome? I don't think we will ever be able to understand this in scientific terms or in any concrete, evidence-based format, because the possibility of analyzing it in this way is very limited. तो जिस चीज़ का कोई proof नहीं है, उसमें हमारा कोई interest नहीं है। हम नहीं मानते, हम नहीं जानते, हम नहीं समझते। हम अपने दिमाग की limited capacity उन चीज़ों पर लगाना पसंद करेंगे जिनका evidence है और जिन्हें scientifically, logically और rationally समझा जा सकता है, बजाय उन concepts के जिन्हें prove या disprove ही नहीं किया जा सकता.

The only way you can avoid crowded trades is by not looking at the crowd.

Market Quadrant 36/2026 A relatively easy market, where the watchlist & portfolio feedback is good, many breakouts are sustaining, & follow-throughs are not a rarity. I find this statement to be a strange divergence from the breadth metrics mentioned below, but it is what it is. For what it's worth, we have very early signs of improvement in momentum & swing, the two metrics short-term swing traders need to care about the most. ⦿ Bias → Bear From a long-term perspective, we remain in a bear market, as more than 50% of stocks stay below their 200-day simple moving average. ⦿ Trend → Sideways The 52-week Net New Highs have not yet remained consistently positive for the past 3 days, and more than 50% of stocks have not consistently remained above their 50-day MAs. ⦿ Swing → Neutral The swing state still needs more confirmation before being labeled as on the green side. The MBI stayed green throughout the week, with the last 2 sessions coming up with 400+ 4.5R numbers. Over the past three days, fewer than 50% of all stocks are trading above their 10-day moving averages. One of the earliest signals of breadth improvement is the 10-day breadth crossing over the 20-day breadth. ⦿ Momentum → Negative but improving Realty, Capital markets, Metal, Media, Pvt Bank are the indices with positive & improving momentum. Other indices with positive (but worsening) momentum include Metal, IT, Pharma & Defence. That’s all for this week.