Mid-term investing benefits from a blend of fundamentals (the business story) and charts (how the market is reacting to that story).
12.1 Basic Fundamental Checks
Before you buy any mid-term idea, do a short, repeatable checklist using free data sources:
- Revenue and earnings trend
- Are sales and profits growing, stable, or shrinking over the last few years?
- Margins and profitability
- Is the company consistently profitable, or are margins under pressure?
- Debt and balance sheet
- Is debt manageable relative to cash flow, or dangerously high in a rising-rate environment?
- Valuation
- Basic metrics like price-to-earnings (P/E) and price-to-cash-flow versus peers or historical averages.
You don’t need to build complex models. You do need to avoid obvious red flags (exploding debt, collapsing earnings, sky-high valuations without clear justification).
12.2 Using TradingView to Refine Entries and Exits
Once the fundamentals look acceptable, use TradingView to refine your timing:
- Timeframes
- Daily chart for overall trend and structure.
- 4H or 1H chart for fine-tuning entries if you want more precision.
- Trend direction
- Is the stock making higher highs and higher lows (uptrend) or the opposite?
- Is price above or below key moving averages (e.g., 50-day, 200-day)?
- Support and resistance
- Identify zones where price has bounced (support) or repeatedly stalled (resistance).
For a 1–3 year horizon, you don’t need perfect pinpoint entries. You’re mainly trying to avoid obviously poor points (e.g., chasing a vertical spike with no plan).
12.3 Building a 1–3 Year Thesis Step-by-Step
Example workflow:
- Idea
- You notice a Canadian bank stock that has lagged but has solid earnings and a strong dividend.
- Fundamentals
- Check earnings trend, dividend history, and valuation.