This is Social Confidential where Adweek's Social Media editors take a look behind the logo to find out who's tweeting and sharing from major brands. I'm Jess Zafaris, and I'm here for a sweet, yet also decidedly sour conversation with Shelby Jacobs, Social Marketing and Strategy Manager at 360i. But you may know her as the Commander-in-Chief of Legions of Sour Patch Kids and their fans on social media. So I saw the other day that you attempted to hypnotize your social audience as a marketing tactic, and honestly, I don't think it worked. I really think that we've figured out of the last, especially year and a half, what really makes our audience click. And when it comes out to it, it's just delicious-looking product. Finding new ways to display it is always our challenge. But we're doing a great job with that, and we're also having a lot of fun doing it. And so that means we have to try and hypnotize our fans every once in a while. So be it. The hypnosis tweet really exemplifies SBK's more self-aware tone on Twitter, which is a common trait of brand accounts these days. How do you cultivate that tone and differentiate it from that of other brands? We do have a face to our product. I think a lot of brands have the challenge of trying to personify an inanimate object. Sour Patch Kids, when you look at our Twitter, you see a Sour Patch Kid. I think that's where we have the advantages that when you look at us and you see us talking and we're self-aware, you almost see a literal Sour Patch Kid. SPK is the most followed snack brand on TikTok with more than 1 million followers. How did you go about growing that account so rapidly? Because this happened in like a year. We're really big on real-time optimization, and that goes over to TikTok too. It's not just where you know things move a mile a minute. It's more like on TikTok where trends can last two weeks. Sound trends can last multiple months. We really have no rules when it comes to trends. We see something that we like that we think will work for the brand and is safe for us to play with. And we'll hop on as soon as possible. Our most viewed TikTok, my coworker removed everything from her refrigerator and stuffed it with Sour Patch Kids and just all she had to do was open the door and that was it. What would you say is the sweetest part of your SPK work? I would say the sweetest part of my work is just having those clients that just trust you so emphatically and just like want to do things with you and are rarely ever saying no and just trust you to make the right decision for your brand. If you could offer one piece of advice to other brand social managers, what would it be? You know, slightly pushing the envelope and taking like very, very, very, very small risks and then providing data that says like, yeah, this was a good move. That will allow clients to really like open up their trust and understand that like, oh, maybe we don't need to see everything. Maybe we don't need to touch everything. Maybe they do understand this. Maybe they do have it. That's why we hired them. And then just from a personal side, no one to log off. This job is 24 seven.  There are also times where I'm like, I can not look at another tweet today and just, you know, set those limitations and no one to log off and understand that Twitter will be there tomorrow and it's okay to like give yourself some time. So Shelby, this has been an amazing conversation. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for having me. I'm Jessica Ferris. See you next time on Adweek's Social Confidential.


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Welcome. I hope you had a good lunch and my name is Chris Ward or Chris Chinchilla, in case you're wondering what this is. It's not a mouse. It's very specific. And you'll possibly be pleased to hear this will be a container-free zone. No mentions whatsoever. Let's begin. So, I have a question first for everybody. When you find yourself at a new project, and I'm going to use project to mean software, service, product, project, whatever. Just using this catch-all term to save repeating many times different words. What's one of the first things you will look at? It's a loaded question, but feel free to shout out an answer. What's one of the top three things at least you're likely to look at? It's a loaded question, but yes. I would hazard a guess that if it's not the first thing, it's one of the, at least the top three things you will look at when you reach and you project that you're interested in. So, in this presentation, I'm going to try and give a bit of a crash course, the selected highlights, if you were, into how you can make documentation for your projects better. It's just highlights. It's not everything, but hopefully enough to just help you make what you have better. I might just, before I get to the real advice, let these people sit down. Okay. So, I'm going to begin with what I'm going to call the three Ws, which is maybe slightly, me just trying to find a convenient way of having a catchy thing to remember, but I think it actually makes some sort of sense. And these three Ws are who you're writing for, what are they trying to achieve, and then why are you writing this in the first place. And some of this is maybe a little bit of a cliche. It might be something that sounds fairly obvious thing to say, but I would also say that with most projects you're working on, if they're bigger, you've probably already looked at some of these points in product design, user story generation, and things like that. You've probably already answered some of these questions, and there's no reason they can't apply to documentation as well. So, the who is broad? It could be more than one type of person, depending where you are in documentation. Is it a blog post? Is it more in-depth documentation? Is it the intro text, the first page of the website? Is it a GitHub repository? The who may vary slightly in each case, and each person in each case will have slightly different needs and knowledge. And what are they trying to achieve, and why are you writing this? Are you trying to get people to install your project and use it? Are you trying to give it publicity? And what are they trying to achieve by installing, downloading, running your project? And as I say, hopefully during planning phases, you have already addressed some of these questions, but think about them again when writing documentation. And I guess the first point in addressing some of these is assume nothing. I think it's a safe assumption that you can assume nothing. Quite often, we assume as developers or technical people, or however you want to describe yourself, that everything we make is standard or normal, and done in a standard or normal way that should be understandable by everybody else who's in a similar place to us. But actually, in my experience, you would be surprised how different many people actually implement things, and how when you think that your unique way, sorry, and actually that your way, no matter how normal and standard you may think, is actually more unique than you may think. So, for example, in documentation, is that protocol, that technique, or that dependency that you think everyone must have installed? Do they really? Well, there's no harm in mentioning it anyway, just in case really, it takes an extra few seconds, and everyone has a much nicer experience. Again, not everybody has the same programming implementation experience in history as you. Some people might have come from an academic background, some people may be more self-taught learners.  This is possibly slightly harder to address, but again, always question your assumptions. This is probably good advice for many things, but especially in documentation. Then maybe one of the next important points is to refine your concepts. Make a start by explaining in the simplest terms you can what your project does. And if you can't find a way of reducing these concepts into something simple, if you like to borrow kind of phrase from the startup industry into an elevator pitch, a three-minute pitch, then maybe try harder, try to refine your idea more. I personally actually feel that most ideas, no matter how complicated, can be reduced to a simple pitch, if you like, that everyone can understand. Of course, you're going to lose some of the subtleties and detail, but that's okay. You're just explaining something in brief as to what you're trying to accomplish, and then the person can make up their mind if that is something that they're interested in or not. I understand not everybody is good at this, so if you're not good at it, find someone who is to help you refine that concept to its real kind of core meaning for being, why you're doing what you're doing in the first place. Next, maybe slightly controversial statement, API docs are not always enough. I would generally say they're never enough, but there are actually certain circumstances where they are, which I'll come to in a minute. API documentation, it helps you describe what the components of your project do, what this endpoint and these methods do, and how someone can interact with them, but they don't necessarily describe how someone can assemble them into something that makes sense, an accomplishment, a task, a component of their own project, and this is actually a little bit dependent on programming language. For example, we've found with some tracking of what people read per language that often Java developers actually do jump straight to API documentation. We could question a lot of the reasons for this, possibly they tend to be more experienced developers, maybe they've been around longer and they don't need any hand-holding and they just want to jump straight in to the kind of descriptions of the tools, or maybe it's something else, whereas, for example, JavaScript, Ruby, Python developers actually tend to like to follow tutorials more. This also is a very hard thing to measure because maybe your Java documentation is very good and that's why they're going straight to the API documentation, but just bear in mind, again, not everybody is the same, so sometimes there are differences, but I would say that if you can, build at least a Getting Started tutorial on top of your API descriptions to help explain how to assemble these pieces together. Next, I'm going to say it's not a manual. Actually, we had recently the Write the Docs, which is the kind of technical writers conference in Prague a couple of weeks ago, and someone did a report there that showed actually there are some cultures and people, but predominantly in this, we were looking at particular cultural groups around the world that actually do read documentation no matter what form it is from start to finish, but this is actually quite rare. You probably know yourself, it has it a guest that when you come to a project, you probably read the Getting Started, you download it, install it, then you look for something specific and jump around a bit. You hardly ever, books are obviously different, but we're talking about documentation. You hardly ever read, actually, just from start to finish. So again, you can't assume that's how people will read your documentation. Also, bear in mind how people are getting to your documentation. Quite often, people are not getting to your documentation from your documentation, they're coming to it from searching for it and trying to find a particular page. It's a very common way of someone arriving at any web page. So again, you can't guarantee that the three important steps they should have followed before have actually been followed. So there are techniques, of course, to help with this. You can have navigation that guides people through. You can have links back to important concepts that they should have done already, and so forth. If you have a project that actually needs someone to follow things in a certain order, this could be especially relevant for hardware, for example. In a very interesting kind of edge case, we had one of the documentarians from Google data centers at our conference, and people there have to follow things in exact order. You can't plug cables in the wrong order. They have to go in the right order. So there are certain instances when you may need that. So find a way to gently encourage readers to follow steps in a certain order if they have to. Okay. We'll come back to this point. Now, interactivity, this is getting into a bit more of maybe sugar on top of documentation, actually. This isn't possible with all projects. For example, maybe big data ecosystem projects, it might be hard to offer interactivity, but there may be some ways too. But if you can actually add any interactivity to your documentation, it helps readers understand a concept, and in the age of most of our documentation being read online, this is actually fairly easy to accomplish. We have access to a wealth of rich media we can use. So this could be in the form of embedded code examples, interactive consoles, API browsers, or if all else fails, maybe a video or animated gif. And I've got a few little examples here. So this is an example from a database company. This is a JavaScript console with a pre-populated query. It looks like a real terminal. It isn't, but it looks like it. You can issue a query against a test server, and it brings back some results.  I'm going to start dropping databases and doing all sorts of nefarious things. So bear in mind that you might have to restrict people a little bit, or have like a refresh script or something like that. But these sorts of techniques are actually very effective, because not only do people read some examples, they can then see exactly how it works. If you don't want to create your own, there are things like JS Fiddle. So here's another example in the middle of, sorry, CodePen, in the middle of an example, where you can actually jump straight into playing around with the code and see changes live. This is, of course, very applicable to something like JavaScript, where it's a web technology. Not every technology will allow you to do this, but if you can, it's a very effective way of explaining a concept. Here is one from an API browser. So again, we explain the concept. You can click on the example endpoint, look at the headers and the parameters, and then just experiment to see what happens and the response that you're going to get. Of course, this is pre-populated with example data, which may or may not be useful, and we'll come to explaining examples later. But it's again a good way of seeing what to expect. And when you're doing something in your own project with this library, you can see, well, that's not quite right. This isn't how, this isn't what I'm expecting to see. Okay. Let's now move on to language. Again, this is selected highlights. This is probably an area where most people would like the most advice and you could go on forever. I didn't train in English. I trained in computer science, actually. So a lot of, it's strange, actually, I've relearned a lot of English grammar because that's the language I write in recently and understood some of the more technical underpinnings of the language as well, which has been quite interesting. And also living in another country, I live here in Berlin, has helped me question my own language as well. It's actually quite interesting. That's a whole other issue. It's mostly English examples. Some of these may be applicable to other languages because some people are better writers than others and some people are better coders than others and explaining concepts clearly is a skill in itself. I personally was a coder for quite a while, but I found whilst I could code, I wasn't the best at it. I was actually better at explaining things to people. And there's plenty of very good coders who are not very good at explaining things to people. So there's room for people in the middle somewhere. Okay. So my first one would be involve the reader. We know that often developers can be a slightly skeptical and sometimes sort of blasé group of people who like to think or we like to think that we always know better than anybody else. And so whilst writing with a more user focused approach and some examples that I'll come to can sometimes come across as a little bit demeaning or patronizing, if you're not careful, if you can get the balance right and done well, it can be quite effective. So let's have a look at some examples. So here is a perfectly good explanation of a function. Function takes parameter X and returns value Y. This is just an example. I'm not spelling out exactly what it's doing just for an example. It's clear. It's understandable. It's fine. Let's have a look at maybe a different way we could write this. So in this case, you can use function to return the value of Y based on X. It's a small change. It's quite subtle in some respects. But what we're doing is we're putting the person reading the document in kind of a scenario and involving them in the narrative. And incidentally, you could use we in this example too. This is actually a personal preference. But it often comes also comes down to consistency. Once you've picked one, stick to it. And it's a very kind of simple fix. And I must admit, when I first started trying this, I was a little skeptical. I've only really been trying this technique for about the past six months. And again, when I would read technical documentation, there was a lot of sort of you can do this and you can use what we're saying here. I initially did find it a little patronizing. But actually, firstly, it works quite effectively. It does work quite well. And also you start to find your own writing gets more fluid as well. The flow of your own writing actually starts to become easier and feels better. It's a tough one to get the balance right. And for example, there may not always be a person as the thing being involved. It may be a system. It may be that the server can use function to return the value of Y based on X, et cetera. So when we're writing technical documentation, we're not writing fiction. But there is no harm in trying to tell a story in a limited capacity, of course. There is a bit more we could do here. For example, we could include examples. So you can use function to return the value of Y based on X. We could make this more clear what could a person be trying to do in this case. Picking examples is actually quite a challenge in itself. Because you have to decide, do you pick an example that is too specific and the reader just looks at it and thinks, well, that's nothing to do with what I'm doing. This doesn't make any sense. Or do you pick something too simple that people don't understand the level of complexity you could go into? So it's actually, it could almost be a talk in itself. It's quite complex to get it right with the right data. There's also, I keep referring back to the conference we had because it's fresh in my mind, we had someone who does documentation for Atlassian and they describe what they call the right level of wink, which is a slightly odd term, but adding in a bit of narrative and a bit of fun, but not too much. And again, it's a difficult balancing act and it depends a little bit on your project. So I'm just going to jump into a little bit of technical explanation of what has happened here and try to break down what we're doing. It's actually an example of passive versus active voice. And it's more of a grammar style than a concrete rule. And again, as I say, it's up to you. You don't have to use these things. It's not, English grammar does not say, you must do this. It's up to you and how you feel things feel better. But in my experience, it has worked quite well. So here is this example again, worded slightly differently. So function can be used to return the number of Y based on X. Again, it sounds pretty similar. It still sounds, I think, better than the first example. What is wrong? I say there is nothing wrong, but this is an example of passive voice. And this is, I'm not entirely sure if other languages have this kind of this problem, but it can come across sometimes as sounding a bit withdrawn. And again, in technical communication, this is not so important. But let's think of this more sort of human sentence and see how it feels. So holiday approval will be notified in due course. This, I hope you agree, does sound a bit cold and withdrawn. If I got this from someone, this makes me feel a little kind of, first thing I'm a bit unclear about what's happening. And secondly, it does seem a bit like they're just trying to get rid of me. This actually is an example of this, which is very popular in British English. It's called passive aggressive. This sort of almost trying to push away responsibility of the sentence or from anybody, really, there is no responsibility in this sentence. No one is doing anything in particular. And yeah, it also is often used in business speak to sort of step back from any kind of responsibility again. So what could be some examples here, how we could make this a more active sentence? I mean, an example I thought of was something like the HR department, for sake of argument, will notify you about your holiday approval in due course. It's still not fantastic, but at least we know who is going to get back to us and we feel like they're doing something. And that's kind of the difference between passive and active. Putting an actor in the sentence to make it feel like something is doing something. Next, I would say, keep it short. And I'm not going to say keep it simple because we are writing technical documentation and some things are just complex. But complex doesn't have to mean verbose, rambling, unnecessary, long, overly wordy. And this is actually harder than it sounds. It is sometimes easier to write long copy than short copy. One job I had a very long time ago was writing 80-word reviews of music CDs, which shows you how long ago it was. And that was really hard. Trying to distill a hour-long CD into 80 words was very difficult. And this feeds back a little bit to one of the earlier points. If you can't explain a concept succinctly and shortly, then maybe, and here is where I might be slightly rude, I apologize, maybe you don't understand your concepts enough. And you need to take a step back and examine what you have more and get it to the point. There's a couple of little tricks here. So, for example, on an overall level of keeping it shorter, reduce the copy to just what needs to be said and don't repeat yourself. There's also a lot of smaller-level things you can do, shorter phrases, and there's many of these. And English especially is very good at having shorter equivalents to longer phrases. And this is actually interesting. I spent a lot of my time editing in some jobs, editing text, English text from German speakers, but also I spent a lot of time doing it from Albanian speakers and Indian speakers. And they all have their own kind of translations of phrases in their language into English, which there's lots of patterns. And this is a separate talk in itself. So, for example, a very common German one is in order two. In English you can say two. And that cuts out quite a lot. So, there's lots of the little things that you start to spot patterns in your own writing that you can cut out. And there are tools that can help you with this, which we'll come to later. And just to wrap up this little section, here is a great catchphrase. No one is exactly sure who said it. But it's very true. It is quite hard to write something short. And it is a skill in itself. So, let's have a look at structure. I mentioned earlier that readers can enter your documentation at any place in a documentation. In fact, I lied. It gets even worse than this. There have actually been many reports to show that in online reading and eye-tracking experiments, most readers, and especially of technical content, and I bet at least 90% of you could say you've done this, all you do is look at titles, look for code blocks, and then go somewhere else. Does everybody pretty much do that? Yep. So, I've pretty much just said here's how to make your documentation better. And now I'm telling you, no one's reading it. What can we do to improve this? Okay. So, here's an example. And I will say, so I spent a little bit of time working for a technical blog as well, which is ad supported. And ad supported sites actually sometimes do a better job of this because they have to, because that's how they're paying the bills and the wages, so they have to be better than sometimes internal documentation. So, here's quite a nice example. It's a reasonably sort of reasonably complex topic. It's quite long. But I'm going to scroll through. And we can see, actually, when it plays, here we go, it's got lots of nice headings and subheadings and notes, code blocks quite regularly. Again, lots of subheadings. It's quite long. But we can elements of the page jump out at us. And we can use these through careful kind of dividing of the page. And we can actually see like paragraphs of text usually tend to be fairly short, meaning that we at least have a better chance of getting people to read what we have by segmenting up this page as much as possible. And I mean, personally, this sometimes feels like it's a step we really have to go to, because sometimes it feels like a step you don't even want to do. But it is the sad fact, and we've all just admitted to it, that people spend a lot of time not paying much attention to the bodies of text. So it's a way of making sure people do as much as we may not like it. Consistency. I'm quite a big believer in consistency, in documentation, and what you define as the rules of consistency. So your style guide, your technical language guide, whatever it may be, maybe a marketing style guide from the company will be up to you and your organization. But when you have decided on it, try to stick to it. So for example, looking at the active voice example, if you decide to stick to you, always use you. Don't use a mixture of you and we. Unless, of course, you are referring to you, the reader, and we, the company. That's a different case. But or if you have a company name, a project name, a way of describing a particular technical element, so for example, do you refer to an instance or a node? Do you refer to a cluster or a group, etc., etc. Once you've figured out the terms you're going to use, stick to them. And this is often because when you're using inconsistent terms, it can be quite disconcerting for a reader because you're not sure if it's referring to the same thing or not. And this doesn't mean that you or your team, if you have a team of writers or contributors, have to write like machines with no character. It is possible to balance the character with style. Okay. I think I'm running slightly early, but we'll see how we go. Tools. I'm not actually going to go into too much detail on tools because technical writers, much like developers, love to argue about this endlessly. And I don't really want to get too distracted by that discussion. I might tell you some of my personal preferences, but it's really up to you and what works for you. And also, yeah, it depends on your platform, your language, etc., etc. So formatting and editing. Most technical writing is usually done in some sort of plain text format. I've met very few technical writers who use anything like Word or the equivalent. But there are actually quite a few who use Wiki-like tools. Confluence from Atlassian is actually surprisingly popular. But also like Media Wiki, the sort of underpinnings of Wikipedia and some other examples are also popular. So what these markup languages tend to do is separate out the writing from the formatting and try not to distract you too much. And this is one of the reasons we don't like to use Word. Most people's first memory of Word is opening up a document and being confronted by buttons everywhere. And you get distracted by trying to make something look nice instead of actually on the writing. And the plain text options kind of just abstract that. If you want to set a heading, you set a heading. What the heading will look like is not really your business. It's up to how the documentation is rendered in the long run. So it's separating these concerns of content and display. So personally, I like a format called Markdown, which is reasonably well known. It's very simple. It defines a limited selection of formatting options for your text. And you just write. And actually, to be honest with you, when I first started using markup languages, I was a switcher from Word and Pages and things like that. Initially, I was really skeptical.  And I can't do anything here. But within a few months, it really blew my mind how much more productive I was being. And actually, personally, I use Markdown for almost everything. And even writing letters and things like that. Because it just gets out the way and I just write. And it's a really nice focus. Markdown has its limitations. If you need a little bit more complexity over layout, if you want to be doing things like note blocks or defining code blocks in a different way or more complex tables, you might want to look at things like restructured text, ASCII doc, and there's a whole bunch of XML-based documentation formats as well, which you'll probably know if you need them. Or you're working at a company that is often working in a kind of more enterprise proprietary ecosystem and is using these tools. But a lot of them are open source, too. And when it comes to editing, again, lots of text editors. I think text editor versus text editor is one of the oldest arguments in development. I personally love Atom from GitHub because I'm not a coder, so I like things that look a bit nicer. And at the end, you can see my blog and I wrote a post recently about how to customize Atom for writers. And it's actually been a very popular post. But there's many others. And the great thing, again, about using plain text formats is if you are also a coder, your editor, and even IDEs probably will also support many of these text formats. So you don't even have to change environments to do any writing. You can do everything in the same place. And again, a lot of these tools will have expandability options. Of course, there are expandability options for something like Word, but it's a lot harder, whereas writing expansions for text editors is fairly straightforward, he says. Management of documentation and displaying documentation. So much like the code projects, the code of the projects we're documenting, it's also a good idea to manage your documentation. Likely in something that at least resembles version control. This is important firstly because often documentation is a combined effort as well from teams. It's not always just one person, much like the code. It also allows you to version the documentation. Sometimes when you introduce a new feature into a new version of a project, the documentation needs to reflect that. But you might also have a lot of customers on an older version that doesn't have that feature. So you have two versions of the documentation. And if you're version controlling and organizing your code into branches or tags or whatever else the concept might be, it lets you separate out the different versions from each other. So, of course, anything you use for version control, GitHub, GitLab, SVN, Mercurial, Dropbox, anything else that you care to throw at it, you can use documentation too. I work for this company, if you haven't guessed, called Contentful, which is an API-based CMS. We're trying to dog food our documentation. Some of our documentation is in our platform, other bits of it aren't. We don't have our API documentation in there, but I'm actually working on trying to figure out how that could be possible. So, and then you have some very specific sort of CMSs if you like for documentation. Read the docs, which was kind of the project behind Write the Docs. It's largely open source, but also has a commercial offering if you need a bit more support, sort of sits on top of a GitHub repository, and then renders a documentation for you and handles all the versioning and things like that for you. The example I showed you earlier of the API browser is a project called Apuri, which, again, is a sort of mixture of open source and commercial, and there's plenty of custom tools, static site generators, even a content management system if you want to, wikis, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, as I say, technical writers are technical people. We like playing with tools, too, and arguing about which one is better. So, taking it up a notch, this kind of gets to sort of more interesting, exciting stuff, but also a bit more complicated. One of the other big advantages of keeping documentation in plain text is the ability to perform all sorts of things on it. The text is just text. It's not encased in some kind of container file anywhere. It's just plain text, really. So, these vary in all sorts of levels of complexity. Testing. Let's start with testing. Often in technical documentation, we have code blocks. One of the worst things, I think, two of the worst things you tend to find with documentation is it's either out of date or the code examples don't work. Well, one thing we can do is every time you build a new version of your code, there's nothing stopping you also building a documentation into some form of continuous integration or manual testing process and test the code blocks, too. There's, again, lots of options for this. It really depends on your language, your CI tool, your bunch of different things, but most languages have more than one option available, actually. But we could also test our language. This gets a little bit more interesting, and it's something I'm trying to set up at work, and no one is particularly opposed to the idea. I just haven't got around to it yet. A lot of, especially NPM, so Node, so JavaScript, and Python has a lot of little plugins, modules, whatever you want to call them, available for testing grammar, spelling, links, and all sorts of other things. So, there's even like profane language. There's a very good linter I use, and linting isn't really testing, but more highlighting potential problems for good use of English grammar as well, which I found very, very useful. And these are all just modules that can also be plugged in to your continuous integration or testing system. And if you're really bold, you could say, well, if our documentation at this build has a certain percentage of spelling mistakes or broken links, it's not going out. We're breaking the build. And I can bet you're going to annoy some developers by breaking a build for a typo, but this stuff adds up. If you have one typo, okay. If you've got five typos, it starts to look a bit shoddy, and people don't necessarily trust what you're doing so much. I've already covered linting a bit. One of the interesting things with a lot of the text editors I mentioned is you can not only lint your language, as I discussed, and the right good linter, which is an MPM module, is especially useful. You can also lint the code in your examples. So not only test, but lint your code. All the code examples you're showing kind of best practice as well. And then we come to some kind of more complex types of automation. We're working with CI systems. We're working with developers. We all know that we like to reduce as much manual steps as possible. And what's one, if you have a project with a graphical interface, what's one of the most repetitive tasks you're likely to do in documentation? Screenshots. These are great. Screenshots are very useful, but they have a couple of problems. Firstly, they take time to make. And what if you have, like for example, Drupal or CMS, it has lots of screens? Screenshotting everything could take an eternity. Also, they get out of date. Someone changes a CSS style, the button looks completely different. And okay, granted, most people will figure out it's the same thing, but maybe the change is bigger. Maybe some text has changed. It says click the enter button, and there is no enter button anymore. It's now called go. And people can't find it. So it's actually possible to automate screenshotting. And this gets a bit more complicated. And I must admit I haven't done it yet. But the clone community, which is a Python CMS, are very, very good at this. And of course, it's an open source community, so they've shared all their documentation and tooling around this. It's Python tooling, of course, because it's a Python project. But they have a very good system that screenshots everything. Every time there is a build, it runs through some screenshotting. And this can be done in a different sorts of ways, depending on the application. For example, web tooling will tend to use something like Selenium, if you're familiar with, which is a sort of driver for a browser. And you have, like, sort of, what are called headless browsers as well, which is not really a browser, but is kind of thing that can help with this. And then, for example, I know the latest Android studio has the ability to record graphical Android tests as well, visually. So the tooling varies. But if you can get this into your workflow, it'll take a bit of setup. It saves you a lot of time in the long run. And kind of continuing the automation, write your own. I've already said we're generally using maybe open source IDEs or text editors. We're using open text formats. If we want to automate something, let's do it. Let's write something. For example, the text editor I like, atom, is written in JavaScript. It's not too hard to write your own extensions. And for some examples, some I've been working on, and I've already said I'm not the best coder in the world, I wrote a plug-in to export my markdown files to medium. Because quite often I put blog posts up on medium. And now I just have a simple export to do it. It's sort of rejoining two steps we've looked at. We've talked about a style guide earlier, and we've talked about linters. And a conversation I had came up with another writer about, wouldn't it be great to automate, like, style checking? Like, a user-defined style checking. So we came up with this idea of writing a linter for internal style guides. And I haven't written it yet, but it's perfectly possible. And that will actually save a lot of time and effort. And again, we can break the builds on documentation if someone hasn't spelt or capitalized the company name correctly, or we've used instance instead of node, etc., etc. So you have this option to take things a step further and write your own. Or if you can't, you're probably working with developers who can, if you ask them very nicely. So I've left a little bit of time for questions. Just to wrap up, so if you're interested in more, then I've sort of mentioned the write the docs community. It's not the only technical writers community. Germany in particular has a tech com, I think. Correct? No one's corrected me. So I think that's correct. And other countries have these sort of more established technical writers communities. But write the docs is the sort of more, maybe the more, I don't know, I don't want to use any adjectives. Yeah, more community. Like, I don't know, it's not a professional organization. It's, anyway, I won't. If you're in Berlin, we have a meet up here in Berlin. If you're not in Berlin, there's meetups in a lot of other places. And there's a Slack channel, of course. Quite a lot of Americans. So you may always, you may sometimes have to wait for answers to your questions, if you're not in America. But also lots of other people on, especially on the write the docs website who are happy to help. And wrapping up, my kind of final point, why do all this, is that I would say documentation isn't just for developers. And I'm going to claim this quote, unless anyone else wants to, which probably not the first person to say it, but I'm going to claim it. Documentation is actually read by a lot of other people. It's read by marketing people. It's read by search engines. So when people are searching for things, documentation is read by search engines. And also, quite crucially, documentation will be written by the people who sign the checks or pay the bills if we want to use a more modern terminology. You as a developer, or someone as a developer, may find this awesome new project. They understand, they get it. They're a technical person. They say to their boss, hey, this project is great. Can we pay a monthly fee to use it? And their boss looks at it and reads it and doesn't understand what on earth it is. There's typos everywhere. There's spelling mistakes. They may be trying to download something. It doesn't work. They don't get a very good impression. So don't forget, documentation isn't just for developers. It's actually read by a lot of other people, too. And that's kind of my closing remark, I guess. This is me. I work for Contentful as the technical writer. I've only been there a month, so don't blame the docs on me quite yet. This is my personal website.  Sucks. And also a Rubik's Cube. So if anyone wants to ask questions, I've got goodies for you. But thanks very much, and hopefully you do have some questions. Oh, there it is. I was wondering where the microphone was. I wanted to ask you, so when you're talking about, for example, documentation with Drupal and stuff like that, where do you draw the line on where you're working with an open source project, right? And so much of that is already documented by the community. And really what you want to capture is just those customizations that you've made to it. How have you found that in the past? I find that can be a very tricky thing, because some clients, you can quite happily point to that documentation. And you really don't want to start getting into the nitty-gritty bits that are already, you know, covered all across the web. Yeah. I guess even community projects can have a style guide. It doesn't mean people are going to stick to it, but you can have one. If I would then say, if, for example, you as someone who wants to recommend a module to another project and you find that that module's documentation isn't great, of course, I can say the catch-all quote for open source communities, issue a pull request, or maybe write your own blog post to fill in the gaps and things like that. I mean, I guess in community, community, helping them out make it better is probably the best action. But unless it's a company, you can't really force people to do things. You just have to strongly suggest, I suppose. Does that answer the question or not? Yeah, a little bit. I don't know. It's the problem with this stuff. They're broad questions with broad answers. Yes. And how much, I guess, the other thing is when it comes to the problem that I find as well is trying to actually get clients to pay for the documentation as well. So factoring in how do you handle that? I have had personal experience of a lot of this because often companies get to a certain point with people just doing it themselves, and then they get enough complaints from people and support queries, often a good example to show how, while you need a writer, because you're getting all these queries from people saying, I don't understand this, and then the company will hire someone. And unfortunately, that tends to be the process. I know of a handful of companies who will say, we want to be, use a focus from the outset and we'll hire developer relations people, technical writers from the outset, but they are very few, unfortunately. Usually it gets to a point where you're like, oh, my God, no one understands anything, we need a writer. And that's unfortunately usually how it goes. Or you hire someone. Before I started working full time, I did freelance documentation. It's not ideal because you're not getting ahead enough into a project, but it's a compromise. Yeah. But unfortunately, that does tend to be the case. And especially with smaller companies, it's the thing that's left until it's completely necessary. And come and take your pick of freebies in a minute. We'll go for the next question. Any other questions or was that? And feel free to... Oh, yeah. Hi. You said that it's a good idea to keep the documentation in the version control system, obviously, I guess. Would you keep it in the same version control system as the code and ran or if ever? It depends, which is the standard answer to most technical questions. So I would say if the documentation is very tied to the code base, then keep it together. If you have, for example, like getting started tutorials, more kind of the nice to have stuff, then that doesn't necessarily always directly match to the code base. It's more broad, and that can be separate. So I've seen all... It's largely up to you and your tech team, but if you want to do things like the nicely integrated kind of continuous integration, then it'd be better if they're all in the same place, but it's not a deal breaker. But to be honest with you, there is no hard and fast rule. I would just say if documentation is very tightly matched to the code, then try to keep it together and maybe keep some of the other things separate. But I've worked with companies that do a mixture of everything. If they are separate, try to keep the versioning in alignment across the repositories. That would be the main thing. So if your code has a version one branch, then have the matching documentation in a version one branch. But there's no hard and fast rule, I'm afraid. Two minutes, 45 seconds. Any other questions? Cool. Well, if anyone wants Rubik's Cube socks, stickers, or just would like to know a bit more about the company I work for, come and say hello. But thanks very much. And yeah, if you want to come and ask me a question afterwards, also do. Thank you.


The following is a presentation of TFNN, the Tiger Technician Hour with your host, Basil Chapman. Call now. Call free at 1-877-927-6648. Good morning, everyone. Basil Chapman on this Tuesday, the 8th of August. We're looking at the Dow down 362 points. It's up over 400 points yesterday. Now, let me just do a couple of things here and then there's a ton to do. I'll go through this slowly. Should I show it over here? Yes, I'll show it over here. Yeah, there was a Chapman Wave red, inverted Roman candle yesterday. Talking about candles, Teddy will be doing a webinar this coming Monday. It should be fabulous. I used a couple of candles. I've made up a couple of candles and a couple of candle techniques. That's all I used, but really people use candles a lot. It's the information that they give you that's so pertinent. That should really be a terrific webinar. We're looking at this particular candle here. You see this long leg to the upside, big body to the downside, tiny little wick. That's what I call Chapman Wave Roman candle, but this is the upside-down one. But when it occurs within three or four bars of a top, especially if it goes just after a top, which it has the monthly chart, so we don't go there right now, but I have a rule of thumb. That rule of thumb says if the very next session doesn't matter if this is a daily chart, then I'll be looking at the 110-minute, 120-minute chart or even the 10-minute chart. But I said if for over 35 minutes at any point today, if the Dow goes over 35,370, I think 380 or 370, I said there's a really good chance it could get close to just on or just over the high of yesterday. That's the top. That was the top at 35,506. And that becomes really important. Well, what did it do? It had a spectacular... I'm not even sure why it was such a spectacular day, but it ran, ran, ran. It went all the way to 35,497. Yes, six points away. And what happens today? We've given back, we've gone to below the low of yesterday. And that just says to me, this Chapman Wave Roman candle, if we close, we've got three sessions to do. Usually it's two, but I sometimes extend it like the arch formation if you take out the left side low. But I'm saying that if we close any session after this below 35,033, we're looking at something very different. And for the first time, I can say to you the length of time is proportionate to the, to this size, the width, the aperture between the green and the nine period moving average as I get a signal, a cell signal based on a different technique, which I did on August 1st on the Dow intraday. We had that, although that's the day I already said, let's take a short position. Because of this left side, right side, this is a quality match. How are you ready up to the first high and then the second high, the internal high and the residual high? And my suspicion, it's not even proven yet, but my suspicion is that that green period moving average is going to cross negative. Now, if you look at, let me just use this at the YM, it's getting closer and closer, but it's not there yet. If you look at the ES, it's already there from yesterday. That's the, let's just go to the S&P, the cash, yep, the cash has done it today, the E-mini did it yesterday. Look at the RTY, that is the, this is the IWM, this is the Russell 2000, this is the futures, so close within a fraction of turning red. Look at the, let me go to the IWM and see if the cash is the same, yep, cash is the same. Look at the QQQ, it already gave that signal and it's continuing down. It hasn't done that for a while, it did that just for a day back in, was it the first of May? No, the 27th, the 26th and 7th of April. But when it did it last time, it held green for, look at that green and then just two days of pink and ever since the green turned up on the 16th of March, there's been one momentary fractional pink and now we've got it again. I think this is going to be a little bit deeper and yesterday I had a question about whether or not what sector to short. Well, we've already done that, we've already, we've got our short positions. One, I'm not sure if this was, in three cases we were at highs, in two cases we were at all-time highs. You just don't do that, you just don't try to short the best of the best. But using this particular technique, I just, I had no choice for subscribers because that's what we do. I try my very best to get the turning points. I know everybody says, oh, I want the middle 60 or 80 percent. I find that, yes, you can do that, but your risk is much greater because if you put a stop in, you can get taken out. But when you get the edge, right to the edge, it just gives you that look like yesterday's huge move up. It didn't impact us on our two key shorts. It just didn't impact us because we got in right at the turning point. If you're lucky enough to be able to have a technique that just allows you to attempt to do that, remember I got this expression when you pat yourself on the back. Take your hands, take your hands off the wheel to pat yourself on the back. That's when you hit the tree. Believe me, this is no pat yourself on the back situation because this is, the day is young. We just, you saw yesterday how big that move was to the upside. So look, you have the QQQ. So look at the SMHs, the semiconductors today just turned pink. These are all key to my metrics. Now I'm going to do this quickly. I'm jumping the gun here because I'm not looking at where did I want to go? I wanted to show you the TLT. So I had to sing for my subscribers of opening call on Saturday. I'm my hour long video overview video that tells us where we've been, what we're looking at, why we're doing it, what stocks we're looking at, what ETFs, et cetera, currencies, whatever it is. Like I do during the show, except this is pertinent to our positions. And look at this in the, let me go to the KRE. Look, the KRE had a huge volume gap down, a volume Chapman wave price, a volume climax spike to the downside. And since then it's over 28 days that it's been to the upside. SHW, this is the same technique. Look at that huge volume. And look, from the 45 low back on March the 13th, I think it was. Look where we are. We're at 64, starting to pull back, probably going to fill the gap. But look at that. But this TLT, I really struggled with this because that's a very big volume. But that isn't a huge volume. This is not the same kind of look. Not only that, it's had volume at the top, volume at the bottom. So I'm just saying, I think that the US bonds can have a really good rally here, a bounce. But I'm not, this is not, in this case, look right there. It's the day before for bonds that you had the usual.  It can't be, there's a technique that I used, but it's a sub-technique. It is not the real technique of the Chapman wave. Volume, price, climax, low. Okay. So I'm just saying, I don't think the TLT has done it. In other words, I think it's really good for a bounce, but it missed the ictus. It missed that exact day. That's the day. In the TLT, it worked out fine, but the bonds, it didn't. But the TLT volume is just a little bit higher than it was. Look at this. I'm going to give you a total volume of $57 billion on the TLT and $59 on the third. Yeah. If you're looking for potential trading setups in the stock market, then Rocket Equities & Options Report is a newsletter you should try. Tommy O'Brien delivers options and equity trades when the markets present them using a combination of fundamentals and technicals. Sign up for Rocket Equities & Options Report today with a 30-day money-back guarantee so you have nothing to risk. For all the details and to start your subscription today, visit the front page of TFNN.com. TFNN, educating investors. You might think that if you want to be successful at trading in the stock market, you're going to need a crystal ball. After all, it's impossible to predict the future, right? Like any endeavor in life, before you decide it's impossible, get some advice from the experts. You might find that it's not so impossible after all. For daily market overviews that give you direction on the key indices, selective stocks and commodities, subscribe to the opening call newsletter at TFNN.com. The opening call newsletter is written by Basil Chapman, creator of the trading methodology known as the Chapman Wave. The Chapman Wave up-down sequence gives you an edge in identifying price turns, finding the peaks and valleys in stock prices.  First-time subscribers also get a 30-day money-back guarantee. 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Sign up today and become a part of this educational community of traders. Just visit the front page of TFNN.com. Oh, toll-free at 1-877-927-6648 internationally at<PHONE_NUMBER>. So, I can't believe that I had Lilly on my list just kind of background. I didn't kind of follow her all that much.  Diabetes, it's huge in the United States. Actually, all around the world, but especially the United States and especially young kids. Oh, it's just so sad. It's just so unnecessary.  It's just that we manage it, manage it fine. But as a kid, it's just so cumbersome. It's all the stuff that you have to do. So, anyway, Lilly is up $73.00 at 527, up 16%. Leg C in the daily, leg F slash C in the weekly, and a leg G slash C in the monthly. And all I can say is that when you get a kind of a breakthrough drug, it'll be the same thing with Alzheimer's when they finally do something that is more affordable and something that really shows benefits. It'll have just whatever the company or companies that are involved in something like that. So, Lilly, this is a big move to the upside. Eli Lilly, a large farmer, this is a spectacular move. Yes, at some point it'll come down maybe to the 480, maybe even fill the gap to the 450s. But this is given a huge entrance into those, I mean, as it stands, you've gone from the 100 level just two or so years ago to the 500 level. But I think as a weapon, an assault against something like diabetes, which is pervasive, this is spectacular move. So, I'm not talking about the chart right now. I'm talking about the company. I'm talking about the actual results that seem to be much more positive. And all I can say is that it's going to really benefit the company. And any time it just gets mashed to the downside for whatever reason, look at it as something to buy and hold in your portfolio. I wouldn't even be surprised if this is a generational thing that on the next big pullback, you could buy it and kind of keep it in the family for like ExxonMobil, something like that. Because if it's going to follow through, this is going to be even bigger. We'll see what happens. All right, so I just want to get that out of the way. I now need to finish up. Look, gold. So, the question came in. Is a GDX, is this the time for the GDX, the leg D to the downside? And the dollar being in a leg, it's little peak D. It's going to a leg, if it can go a little higher, it can go to a leg E. I'm thinking that the dollar, the way the dollar is acted, the way that the lowercase H has gone to a lowercase M. Let me just show you for those of you new to my work. This is the pattern I'm talking about. I talk three particular lines. One is a straight line up or a straight line down. One is where it curves like a cup and the other is like an arch and you can have a mix of the two. When it comes down like that, makes the arch fails at a peak A or a B. It can go to a C like it did there. This is a dreaded H pattern. Watch out when it takes out the left side low. You can do a one-to-one to the downside. On the upside, we've seen that. The dollar is doing this. It's making these little reverse Y patterns and it keeps taking out the upside. But all I can say is that, oh, and the lowercase H can go to a lowercase M and a lot depends on how it takes out from the left side low. If it had it within two bars or within the same bar that it takes out, if it closes above, it can have a rally to the left side nearest peak or gap or moving average. In this case, that says in the weekly chart or in the daily chart, we'd be looking at this particular high right here of 103.57. But it's really 103.17 is the 200 period exponential. Moving average has been a repellent. It was a propellent for just a brief moment and it became a really serious repellent. And we'll see. But I would just say to you, based on the MACD, based on the 9 EMA, based on the stochastic at 82% in the daily, based on the rising height, look at the beautiful divergence between the MACD back when it made a low. I would say it was early April and 100.79 low back in the week of the 14th of April. Now, when we're making lows back in the week of the 14th and 21st of July, look how nicely the MACD was. It reversed and started coming up. It was way higher and the stochastic was higher. So I'm just saying to you, don't mess around, especially since you can see now the pervasive selling pressure. Dow is now down 453. S&P is down 50. Dow is down 1.27%. S&P is down 1.11. 11, what's the QQQQQQQQQQQ is down 1.47. This is serious stuff. What a false move to the outside. We had a question the other day about false moves and I was talking about it and saying it's kind of a right shoulder failure pattern, not more than a rogue wave. I don't want to go through that now. other than to say, the dollar is telling us right now that the market is responding both to the rally in the dollar. That's part of it. But to me, it's all the story about the moving averages. This is the technical tool of last resort that I talked about. Let's just show you again. Look, the Indu, the Dow. Oops, it was on the wrong chart right here. Let me just show you this one more time. And now I need to go back to the chart that I was showing you the other day. I said, I won't do it today. That was yesterday because it's just, it's, we're gonna have to see what happens. Well, look at this. The nine-period moving average is still way above the 14, but all of a sudden you've got this little turn down of the 14-period moving average. You see the turn down of the nine. All of a sudden you've got parallel. When you've got parallel moves, that means that if it crosses positive or negative, you've got talk to the upside and that builds to momentum. In this case, the momentum to the upside is slowing down and we could get talk to the downside. We've got it in all the other indices plus my key, which is estimators, now down 3.84, 152.07. So I would not ignore that. So yes, the dollar is part of it, but I look at this. Let me just show you gold using this. Look, you can see the patterns making the dreaded H pattern right here. You can see the pink moving average in the daily chart of gold. Yes, the GDX. It's even worse because it's about to take out the left side low. Internal low residual low. Big move up. Internal high, residual high. And now we're coming down. I can't call this an internal low just yet because of the steepness, but we'll see what happens. All right. So I'm just saying to you, I don't see anything there. That's why we got out of our GDX the other day. All right. So now let's go back to our story because I've got all these charts that I've got to go through. So let me just finish this up. Yeah. Crude oil. Crude oil made a peak D and now it's pulling back. Sorry, peak D and then it went to the peak E at exactly, look at this. Chapman wave technique of left side, right side, price, time match. You're talking about, I chose this particular candle right here. So on the April the week of, so on the 14th, is that the 12th of April 2023 goes to peak C with the Chapman wave, two bar reversal right there, 83, 71, 83, 62. It acts almost like a D but it didn't make it. And there's the 200 period group and it plunges and it plunges through that particular low right there. And then it had this beautiful cup formation and it went to the day that I typed in high. And now it's pulling back but it's still holding very well under that. Steve Rhodes started his trading career as a student almost 20 years ago and the student has now become the master. Steve won the prestigious timer of the year award in 2018 and barely missed that mark again in 2019, finishing it number two for the year. 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This is a fabulous move but and the weekly chart says is a cup formation it should have resistance coming up very soon. Let's see tating at the 200 feet moving average the high that was made on the left side in the weekly chart was 2.87 2.87 yeah and today's highest 2.77 I think it's going to try to tag that then I think it should hang around you for a little bit it tends to do that has a big gap up it's got a huge gap that it will take a little time to fill that gap but I do and today's got a gap so I like the action very much is it a longer-term buy-and-hold if you're looking at the high that was made up in the 60s once upon a time back into January of February 2021 that's one thing but this is I think this is in the I think Thuray is in the cannabis sector so let me just see what MJ is doing MJ is doing yeah it's just kind of stuck you know there are a whole bunch of things going on but if Thuray is showing that it's starting to produce profits that's all it's all about it's about profits if it's doing that that it could soon become a leader in the field even though it's only trading in the $250 area okay that good good eye who was that Thuray Thuray Sanel in the den yeah breaking the point on a good volume okay well I think that's the technique of A to B for C to D all right the VIX index right now remember I got a little worried a couple of days ago I said it's just too quick to come off highs and have the VIX index have that big spike on Friday like that whoof up into the 17s I said if it's going to be of importance it's going to sustain and then low and bold you get this spectacular session yesterday look look how the VIX held it went just under 16 and now trading is 17.88 this is a little more serious in that it's saying the cluster formation after the gap up and we'll go to the gap up of the second of August the way it's holding makes us 18.55 200 period exponential moving average which it hasn't even visited let alone for it's being close but it hasn't touched it since that whole cluster of highs back in March of 2023 remember that's when we were so long the doubt from that particular stage and some others so now what we're looking at is yes there's action in the volatility index in the VIX and that's just telling us that that monthly chart where I showed you this long horizontal thick mauve color light mauve color that goes back to where the prices went down to the 8th to the 11th area 10.28 back in July of 2014 8.84 then 8.856 back in late 2017 and then it just lifted off and then that move line became almost like a propellant all of a sudden we went back and touched it over the last two months third month is this month and boom we're up to the upside and that makes the whole area of the 19s really strong monthly resistance in the daily in the weekly chart and I'm just going to go to the highs that were made back in the 20 week of the 26th of May of a 20.81 and 21.30 all I can say is if the volatility index remains over 16 it's going to put pressure on the downside in the market if it actually starts to touch the 20s we will start to see big moves up in the VIX that sees triple big triple-digit down moves in the Dow and big percentage moves in the S&P but the closing price might be something very different as the market tries to establish some kind of a base but in the meantime we're only coming off the tops that were made and if you can believe it look at this the QQQ the QQQ was like a blink of an eye away from the 408.71 high of November of 2021 in this beautiful cup formation it went to 387 I mean 38 you can see by today's action down 5.32 you could have been there in a couple of days and now we're pulling back peak D in the weekly chart beautiful left side right side price time match look at this to the week look at that to that exact low right there it went right to there and now it will take much longer it'll take until roundabout September maybe maybe even October before we can start to head back towards the 408 that means a little digestive phase a little I say little because I'll price wise so far it's just a little but we'll see where it comes down to 380 I'm sorry I meant to say 360 is the 40 period exponential moving average in the weekly chart okay now the couple of other questions and Nike yeah NKE Nike is trading kind of poorly right now on the day but actually it's just in this cluster formation sideways I have to tell you something when you get to sports and sports where I'm looking around I happen to I just wear whatever I wear when I play tennis or outdoors I'm not I don't have to have any yeah I laugh at this have you seen a bicyclist without the tire I mean there was a time where as kids we hopped on a bike it doesn't matter what you were wearing you hopped on your bike and you rode it now everything you do you've got to have the fashion you should I take the time now to talk about fashion to talk about all the things that are going on now I'm not gonna waste time I will I will not be making any changes to a history so I'll talk about it as we go each day but yes what's going on now in the fashion world is telling me and then just a bunch of things I want to include the figure eights I want to include all sorts of things roller coasters and everything in what I'm looking at for what I call the next big phase this is going to be the big phase for the coda phase I don't know how long the coda phase will take we've been in different coda phases but not the ultimate coda phase I just mentioned that right now so Nike says to me people are still buying the stuff because they want all the good they just want and and like sheep we all tend to do this sort of the same sort of thing have you noticed that you can barely find a person who wears the cap backwards it used to be just derigate everywhere you went especially the older guys were wearing it now it's only the older guys young guys are they ever put it backwards it's just my fashion is it's not a comment on whether you're a good person or but it's just the way things work right and I'm looking at this I'm saying Nike has held well so far because of that very factor the fashion factor but it's telling me that if it closes under 105 anytime and I'll say this week it needs to be really quickly then you're looking at this pattern that says uh-oh watch out for the dreaded age pattern because you could test the 103s that was left side low now talk about fashion wow what did I do just a moment to go and I wanted to point it out was it Torrey T L R Y no it wasn't oh no let me just check and see if I can even find it in my list of what I looked at in J Vicks oh ARWR um yeah look at this pattern chart patterns I just it doesn't matter can you believe we are arrowhead farmer a biotech here's your lowercase h that goes to a lowercase m and whoo it takes it out wait a minute is this a pattern you've seen before wait a minute what on earth is the TLT got to do with um ARWR arrowhead nothing just the chart path there it is lowercase h becomes a lowercase m whoosh it goes to 1985 I'll be right back that's a Japanese high good thing the gold report as a precious metal gold is still king it continues to hold the most effective safe haven and hedging properties across the global major trading hubs of the London OTC market the US futures market and the Shanghai gold exchange the gold report Tom O'Brien publishes his weekly gold report every Monday morning for subscribers consisting of coverage of the XAU HUI GDX the dollar bonds the South African Rand as well as 25 different mining equities with specific buy sell recommendations the gold report new subscribers get a 30 day money back guarantee so you have nothing to risk subscribe to Tom O'Brien's gold report newsletter now at TFNN.com are you ready to take your trading to the next level introducing Tom O'Brien's award-winning newsletter market insights your key to successful active trading Tom O'Brien renowned for his expertise in the financial markets has designed market insights to be your daily guide to profitable trades Tom publishes his daily market insights newsletter every market day before the market open along with updates when warranted stay ahead of the game with Tom's real-time analysis and trade recommendations delivered straight to your inbox whether you're a season trader or just starting out market insights provides the edge you need to navigate the markets with confidence ready to join the ranks of successful traders head over to TFNN.com and subscribe to market insights today don't miss out on this opportunity to supercharge your trading results market insights comes with a 30 day money back guarantee for all new subscribers so you have nothing to risk don't miss out on this opportunity to revolutionize your trading game head over to TFNN.com right now to join thousands of traders who have already experienced the power of Tom O'Brien's award-winning newsletter market insights firsthand TFNN educating investors biotech is booming but for how long whether you think the biotech bull has room to run or has run its course trade LABU or LABD directions daily S&P biotech three times bull and bear ETFs visit directioninvestments.com slash biotech today an investor should consider the investment objectives risks charges and expenses of the direction shares carefully before investing the prospectus and summary prospectus contain this and other information about direction shares to attain a prospectus or summary prospectus please contact direction shares at<PHONE_NUMBER> the prospectus or summary prospectus should be read carefully before investing an investment in the funds is subject to risk including the possible loss of principle the funds are designed to be utilized only by sophisticated investors such as traders and active investors distributor foresight fund services LLC this program is brought to you by Vista Gold traded on the NYSE American and TSX under the symbol VGZ just wanted to show you this quickly so you've got a peak C1 C2 in the one-minute chart twice you've got peak D it's acts like a peak D that you've got here right there with the dojo candle at 9 31 this morning at 45 11 come plummeting down and now you in this pattern this is the H pattern and holding the left side low could bounce so you look first for the left side high which in this case is 4492 we're at 4490.50 right now but there's a chance what happens at the 4495 to 4498.50 it's called 90 4498 is going to be imperative to monitor why because the selling pressure you know 10 20 I always say in the morning that's where the next phase of the market starts and that kind of goes to about excuse me about 12 30 or maybe even 110 and then a whole another phase and then you got your three o'clock to 310 or 315 period well this is going to be important because after yesterday you realize that yesterday because it held so well and kept making higher highs there are a lot of people that say oh that has to be allowed not only that you got bonds turning up yours will be coming down etc etc it doesn't quite work that way because selling pressure has to do with the has to do with the momentum of your bullish indicators starting to fail and for me that is in this case I'm just go back to this again let's go to the S&P and that is the S&P's nine period expansion moving average and the days young it has gone pink but this is the first time it's gone pink really second one two three four five six seven eight eight days nine days since it made the 45 0700 27th that's instead of just being an immediate sell-off it's just a whole process and I've called it a process so that just says to me don't mix things up yes you could have a one-minute balance you could have a 10-minute balance but the overall action and I'm going to say once again I might be totally wrong here but I think and and this is what the answer I gave the other day to the sectors and which sectors and I said at this point it's a little risky because you've lost the momentum of getting the exact top or very close to the exact top but if I'm correct in the SMHs the semiconductors they usually leave the markets up and they usually leave the markets down and Nvidia has been such a spectacular movie we had someone email me the other day to say it's 300 and whatever it was PE yeah that's okay it didn't matter when it was going up to the all-time high just recently at the peak C1 C2 has got a C3 even a C4 right now so I need to get to a D 480 was the was that the 480 a 480.88 was the high and it's not doing badly today it's only down six it's not a big deal 400 or 480.88 I think I said 480.88 I'll have to check that out but it is starting to move down as far as micro devices had great great earnings and outlook and everything and yet it has gone from that big candle that's shot up to almost 120 down to 107 and now starting at 113 just stuck sideways if you're looking at I'm not going to go through them all I'm just saying this to me is the clue if the semiconductor index continues to slide to the downside it doesn't have to spectacularly roll over just keeps moving lower and lower that's the same to me that one of my key metrics one of the areas that I consider to be really important I've spoken about this before the the chips for the last 40 to 50 years have become as important as crude oil was for the 1900s so the chips of the crude oil of today for the economy and if they start to move down and if they sort of leading that all-time highs think of this all-time highs who would have even have dreamt that the semiconductors could go from 159 to 85 and then back to 100 was a 61.17 was the high on the 31st trading at 152 big deal down nine points but I have to tell you that if it looks toppy in the daily the weekly is still holding really well so I'm waiting to see because if you start to see the semiconductors as it makes down the 148 to sorry 146 to 144 area in August I think it'll be dragging the market down that's what I'm saying the question was what what sectors and I'm saying the semiconductors is one any of the major indices especially now the IWM that's just really weak the small caps so let's get back to our story could I look at ultra ultra beauty well ultra beauty got decimated spoke about this for ages at 560.60 I was saying this is an unbelievable look how quickly I say whenever you move very quickly in the chaff wave to peak to peak to peak to peak higher peak higher peak with very little rest when you come down it's usually a pretty sharp pullback it doesn't mean to say you're necessarily going to sell signal to sell mode immediately this is a monthly chart I'm talking about wow this is in a sell mode and now it's trading at 437 it looks terrible what has taken its place is elf and elf is just about to do the same thing I'm sorry the same thing on the upside it sort of took took the lead and elf is in cosmetics and here it is 137.48 high about six sessions ago but it also had a 132 round number low on the 2nd of August that day that have made its all-time high it might fill in the gap but it's holding really well so this is now the new leader elf elf beauty in cosmetics watching this one I'm also watching xpo I mentioned this for subscribers to my opening call this is the trucking less than full shipping xbo ink we're looking at it at 72.19 only down nine cents as long as this holds up it says there are certain areas of the economy that are holding well bitcoin btc so bitcoin I've been kind of remiss in following it we had this once with the bitcoin the b gtc b gtc the bitcoin or b gtc no b gtc oh god no no come on bitcoin bitcoin futures continuous gbtc there it is bitcoin investment trust we once had in the 12s had two positions ready short term and long term we never did anything with a short term we just held it we went all the way to 58 we took lots and lots of profits and then I just kind of ignored it for ages once or twice we tried again didn't work just ignored it I think it's going to be back these see these long wick candles that's usually an error that's usually something that happens it's just the funniest thing on earth I'm talking about Brian we spoke about this oh years and years ago we said isn't it funny that on our chart formations we look at charts all the time winners and some kind of an error in reporting and it doesn't get changed sometimes the price actually goes down that price is now at 10 but the prices that that is the the wick has a low run about the 10s and it's trading in 19 I wonder if that'll ever be full but at the same time I think bitcoin has a place I don't personally own any but I think it has a place and subscribers we're out of everything I'm waiting for the next move that says to me you've got some signals that suggest it's got a oh this is a pretty good from October from under 8 to 21 that's a huge gain it's not like it was 12 to 58 but yeah this is I think it will be ready I'm not ignoring it I'll just give you parameters now just based on the bitcoin itself the futures and I'm just saying 27.66 is a 200 period exponential moving average and a 32 area is the resistance it's just stuck there for the moment I think there's one more pullback and now the pullback holds is going to be the thing and that's the point oh we've got one more break to go on I haven't even got to some of the stocks um yeah I'll be back in a moment we'll look at the TNX this is 10 years TFNN has just launched their new trading room the Tiger's Den hosted at Discord TFNN has been educating traders for more than 20 years with live programming hosted by a variety of professional traders during market hours and now they are expanding their reach with the Tiger's Den available to all Tigers and Tigresses for just one dollar for the year there's no cash or added costs when you join our community of traders in the Tiger's Den you can look over the shoulders of Tom O'Brien and the other TFNN hosts while they analyze charts during their live Tiger TV programs and join an interactive trading community with 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now in which to get to 40 497 to 4502 if it doesn't do that this mark is going to be really disappointed and it means that rallies are just doomed to fail without any any much of a balance at all any much of a balance anyway any much of a balance all right so here we go question came in about the TNX yes that is a peak D and there is a pullback is a peak D in the weekly well a leg D it hasn't become a peak we have to wait for Friday's close but I've been suggesting that your yields are stuck in the range for quite for a while and they still stuck in the range so with that I'm going to just see did I get a question yeah I did get a question I wrote it down wrote it down wrote it oh XLF you haven't spoken about the financials yeah XLF is pulling back a little bit it's not a big deal this is at 3473 and so is KRE this is the regional banks pulling back I'm really watching this closely because usually the the banks the banks will go higher with the yields going higher but now I think we start to see a stall so we're watching a lot of things right here I've also mentioned Kudo one more time Kudo has gone to a peak E in the daily chart well I have to wait for today but this is a chap away from a Roman candle so watching it closely because if crude oil at 81 right now actually takes us 7850 at any point in the 7721 200 period moving effort to come to bank so I'm watching Kudo and it did have it does but it's a little choppy right now have a wonderful rest of the day and stay tuned for Steve Rhodes I'll be back with Tom later on