A 300-Year-Old Discipline
The story, Tripathi explained, begins with Munehisa Homma, a Japanese rice trader in the 1700s who noticed something the market hadn't yet named: price moves on more than supply and demand. Greed and fear leave fingerprints too. Homma began logging the daily open, close, high and low of rice prices by hand, spotted recurring patterns, and effectively gave birth to the candlestick chart.
Roughly a century later and half a world away, Charles Dow - editor of the Wall Street Journal - was independently studying price trends and moving averages in the US. His writings were later formalised by his students into what became Dow Theory. The two traditions ran in parallel for decades before merging in the late 20th century into the technical analysis framework used globally today.
"Two different civilisations, no contact with each other, and they arrived at the same conclusion," Tripathi noted. "That should tell you something about how fundamental this behaviour is."
Does Algorithmic Trading Kill the Chart?
The obvious challenge to this old discipline: does it hold up against algorithmic trading and high-frequency desks? Tripathi's answer is an unambiguous yes - because even the biggest institutional order has to move through the market gradually.
A fund looking to deploy hundreds of crores cannot execute the trade in a single tick; it has to build a position over time. That gradual buying or selling leaves visible footprints on a price chart, footprints any disciplined trader can learn to read. As long as human emotion drives buying and selling decisions - and institutions, ultimately, are staffed by humans - technical analysis has something to measure.
Where Retail Investors Go Wrong
Much of the conversation focused on the average salaried investor: someone who invests a portion of every paycheque across a portfolio of 15–20 stocks. Without any framework, Tripathi argued, that investor ends up spreading money thinly across everything, with no sense of which stock is actually well-positioned that month, and which one is simply expensive.
Technical analysis, he said, is not about predicting the future with certainty - a misconception he pushed back on directly. It is closer to judging a student's future career from their study habits: not a guarantee, but a data-informed read on probability. "We are not doing palmistry," he said. "We are working with a system, and that system doesn't need to be perfect. It just needs to be better than doing nothing at all."
Psychology, Not Charts, Is the Real Battle
Perhaps the most striking part of the discussion was Tripathi's insistence that the hardest part of technical analysis isn't the charts - it's the trader's own mind. He described the common trap of retail investors: selling winners too early out of impatience, and holding losers too long out of ego, hoping a falling stock will "come back." Left unchecked, this pattern of panic-selling and revenge-trading erodes returns far more than any bad chart pattern ever could. Mastering that discipline, he estimated, realistically takes about a year of consistent practice - not a weekend course.
He was equally candid about limitations: no chart pattern works 100% of the time, and that is by design, not a flaw. A trading edge built on risk-reward ratios - knowing the potential upside against the defined downside on every position - compounds into consistent profitability over time, even without perfect accuracy.
The Bigger Picture for Long-Term Investors
Even investors with a five-to-ten-year horizon benefit, Tripathi argued. Smarter monthly entry decisions might only add 2–3% of extra annual return - but compounded over 15 years, that difference alone can separate a ₹10 crore outcome from a ₹13–14 crore one.
This philosophy underpins Tripathi's own SEBI-registered advisory work, including his smallcase, Focused Growth 2031, and his stock recommendation service, Mini Marvels, both widely followed by his subscriber base for applying exactly this blend of fundamental conviction and technical timing.
Tripathi is also rolling out a new three-tier (Basic, Intermediate, Advanced) live technical analysis course this year, aimed at closing the knowledge gaps he sees in investors who have picked up fragments of the subject from scattered sources.
His closing message to viewers was simple: "I have never met anyone who regretted learning technical analysis."
