The river idea

Every chart on this site is read the same way, and it starts with one picture: a river. Price is water. Most of the time it flows down the middle of its channel, neither hugging the near bank nor climbing the far one. Sometimes it swells and pushes hard against the outside bank. Sometimes it drops away and scrapes the bottom. The whole framework — every grade, every zone, every bell alert — is just a disciplined way of measuring where in the river price is sitting right now, and what usually happens next from there.

That is the mental model. The rest of this course turns it into numbers.

Why a river and not a target

A grade on this site is not a prediction and it is not a price target. Nobody knows the future, and any tool that claims to is selling something. A grade is a setup-quality score: given the trend, the distance from the middle of the river, the candle that just printed, momentum, and volume, how clean are the conditions for a bounce back toward the middle?

Water pushed to the outside bank tends to fall back toward the center. Water scraped along the bottom tends to rise back toward the center. That pull toward the middle — mean reversion inside a trend — is the edge the whole engine is built to find and rank.

The five places price can sit

You will meet these five zones formally in Lesson 3. For now, just hold the picture:

• BLOW-OFF — price is stretched far above the middle. Climactic. Usually the worst place to buy.
• STRETCHED — above the middle but not extreme. The trade is working; manage it, don't start it.
• IN THE RIVER — near the middle. No edge. Wait.
• PULLBACK — below the middle. The bread-and-butter place to look for a long in an uptrend.
• DEEP-PULL — scraped along the bottom, far below the middle. Oversold flush. Strong names rarely stay here long.

Notice the shape of the edge: the best long setups are below the middle (PULLBACK, DEEP-PULL), not chasing price that is already stretched above it.

What the grade measures — the short version

The letter grade (A+, A, B, C) is decided by a single technical score from 0 to 80. That score adds up five things: where price sits in the river (placement), the candle that just printed, momentum, volume, and whether the broader trend agrees. A separate support score from news and fundamentals is shown next to the grade for ranking, but it never changes the letter. We will build the whole scoring table in Lesson 7 — for now, just know the letter is a technical read, full stop.

A worked example, in plain words

Say a strong, uptrending stock sells off for three days on quiet volume, then prints a hammer candle right as it scrapes the bottom of its river, and momentum ticks up from oversold. That is a DEEP-PULL with a confirming candle and a momentum hook — close to a textbook A. Now say a different stock has run straight up for two weeks, punches far above the middle on a huge green candle, and everyone on social media is euphoric. That is a BLOW-OFF — the score will grade it down hard even though it "looks" strong, because buying stretched water is how accounts get hurt.

Same framework, opposite conclusions, and neither required a crystal ball.

Where to see this live

• /grading — every scanned name graded and ranked right now.
• /ticker/<symbol>/chart — the river drawn on any chart, with the zone labeled.
• Bell alerts fire when a name flips into BLOW-OFF or DEEP-PULL — the two most actionable edges of the river.

The free tier scans about 280 large-caps; Pro opens the full universe of roughly 4,400 names.

Recap

• Price is a river; the framework measures where price sits relative to the middle.
• A grade is a setup-quality score, not a prediction or a target.
• The five zones run BLOW-OFF → STRETCHED → IN THE RIVER → PULLBACK → DEEP-PULL.
• The best long edges sit below the middle; stretched water above it is where rallies exhaust.
• The letter grade is a 0–80 technical score; news/fundamentals rank but never change the letter.

This is educational material only, not financial advice. Always do your own due diligence.