Trade alongside swing trading experts.
Daily market videos, monthly live seminars, and Brian’s real-time take on the charts that matter.
Gain an edge with real-time stock and crypto insights, interactive monthly seminar, and daily market updates on X.
Alphatrends is a swing trading education platform built by Brian Shannon, CMT, for traders who take their own capital seriously.
Meet Brian Shannon, 35-year trading veteran and AVWAP pioneer
For over 35 years, Brian has traded his own money through every kind of market.
Alphatrends is where he teaches the framework that makes that possible: low-risk setups, disciplined risk management, and a repeatable read of price action across multiple timeframes.
If you’re an intermediate or advanced swing trader looking for a process, not tips, you’re in the right place.
The Difference
Most trading services sell noise: hot tips, hype, and a new setup every hour. Alphatrends is the opposite.
We’re built on a single conviction: capital preservation comes first. Every idea comes with a defined risk, a defined stop, and a reason. Every video teaches the why behind the trade, not just the ticker.
Brian Shannon has been trading professionally since the late 1980s and teaching since 2005. He earned his Chartered Market Technician (CMT) designation and has authored three books on technical analysis, including the 2023 #1 Best Investment Strategy book on Amazon.
About 95% of our analysis is based on price action, not headlines, narratives, or predictions. If the story doesn’t show up in the tape, it’s too risky to trade.
Our primary timeframe is days to weeks. If you’re looking for full-time scalping or day trading, we’re not your fit. If you want a sustainable, part-time-friendly approach that fits around a life, keep reading.
Brian is credited (in part) with developing the AVWAP indicator, and it’s central to how we time entries, exits, and breakouts. [Learn more about AVWAP]
The Alphatrends Team
Alphatrends Founder
Brian is a full-time trader with 35+ years of market experience, a Chartered Market Technician, and the author of three books on technical analysis. He’s credited (in part) with developing the Anchored VWAP indicator, which is now used widely across professional and retail trading.
Brian teaches the way he trades: methodical, honest about mistakes, and grounded in a genuine passion for helping others succeed with their own capital.
Senior Analyst
In January 2026, Andy Moss joined the Alphatrends team, the first trader other than Brian to post analysis under our banner since 2008.
Andy brings 26+ years of market experience, including a role as Senior Portfolio Manager at Morgan Stanley. He’s also a Chartered Market Technician. Members get his pre-market and midday video reads posted directly to our Discord, adding a second experienced voice to your daily prep.
Not ready for the full membership? The X Subscription gives you Brian’s real-time thinking on X for a lower monthly commitment.
Not every trader wants a subscription right away. Brian’s books and courses stand on their own as a foundation.
The #1 Best Investment Strategy and Analysis book on Amazon at release. A practical guide to using AVWAP for entries, exits, and breakout timing, distilled from decades of Brian’s own trading. Learn more or view on Amazon.
Brian’s foundational book on market structure and the psychology of price movement. Considered required reading by many in the community. Learn more or view on Amazon.
Ground-up fundamentals for newer traders. View course.
Brian’s full framework for consistent swing trading. View course.
These are the questions Brian gets asked most often. Answering them here gives you a real preview of how he thinks, and helps you decide if his approach fits how you want to trade.
Moving averages often act as support in an uptrend or resistance in a downtrend, but stocks blow right through “important” moving averages all the time, leaving traders who acted at those levels with losses.
Unless you’re a systems trader, the right way to use moving averages is as a visual reference point where support or resistance is possible, not guaranteed. Like any potential level, a moving average gives you a reason to study price action closely as it approaches, not a reason to act automatically. The choice between simple and exponential matters less than the discipline of confirming the level with price action.
Brian stays generally aware of a company’s fundamentals, but about 95% of his decision-making is based on technical analysis.
As a trader, timing is everything. Regardless of how good the story appears, if price action doesn’t support it, the trade is too risky. As Brian likes to say: Only Price Pays!™ The majority of our analysis focuses on price action for that reason.
Volume analysis on individual equities is far more important than the widely reported trading volume for the indices.
Brian first uses volume as a measure of liquidity to decide whether a stock is worth trading at all. Anything under roughly 500,000 shares per day on a 20-day average is typically the cutoff. Once a stock qualifies, Brian looks for volume expanding in the direction of the primary trend and contracting during pullbacks. That pattern signals continued participation and helps confirm a setup is healthy.
A solid understanding of basic technical analysis, including price patterns, is helpful. But more important than memorizing pattern names is understanding the psychology of how those patterns develop, and the motivations of the participants that trigger actionable price movement.
Our daily videos emphasize participant psychology and what may cause traders to act at certain times. That gives you a much deeper understanding of how price movement evolves than pattern recognition alone.
Candlestick charts are more visually appealing than bar or line charts, but beyond that Brian pays close to zero attention to the patterns they form.
If you want to understand the message inside a single candle, or a group of candles, you’ll learn far more by analyzing the data on a shorter timeframe. The detail from shorter timeframes gives you a clearer read on the action inside the larger timeframe candle.
If it isn’t clear whether you should be long or short, it typically means you should avoid trading the stock until the message becomes clearer.
There are thousands of liquid equities and ETFs to trade. If you have a favorite stock, that’s fine, but don’t forget that cash is the best position during uncertain times. It lets you observe the action objectively and keeps capital ready to deploy when the lower-risk trade reveals itself.
The official trade ideas typically use suggested stops 2 to 3% from the entry price, and not everyone is comfortable with stops that far away.
The focus of Alphatrends is swing trade setups, but those setups often work as day trades too. A day trader looking to hold for initial momentum will want immediate action once the stock triggers, and will recognize a failed move well before a swing trader would exit. That’s why we sometimes offer tighter alternative levels: they let day traders and short-term swing traders use the same setup with a stop that fits their timeframe.
The trade ideas we post are always suggestions, never instructions. When Brian gets involved in a trade and the stock moves quickly in his favor, he likes to take a little profit early.
That accomplishes two things: it covers transaction costs on the trade, and it puts you in a “position of strength” on the remainder. Watching the rest give back gains doesn’t sting the same way when part of the position is already booked. Adjust the approach to fit your own psychology and timeframe.
It’s smart to have an idea of where a stock could go. That’s the reward side of the risk/reward ratio, and it helps you decide whether a position is justified in the first place.
But once you’re in the trade, you have one job: manage risk. There’s a saying that “winners take care of themselves,” and that’s partly true, but we can’t sit idly waiting for a target to be reached. We adjust stops, take partial profits, and stay responsive to what price is doing right now. The target is a guide, not a promise.
No two traders share the same timeframe, financial resources, risk profile, or belief about how stocks trade.
The goal of Alphatrends is to identify and communicate low-risk, high-probability swing setups every day. If you like to hold longer, extend your targets. If you think the stops are too tight, widen them. If you’d rather day trade the same idea, do that. The setups are the starting point, not the instruction manual.
A lot of factors go into consistency, but a few show up in nearly every successful trader:
For Brian, the plan is built on a solid understanding of market structure and a relentless emphasis on risk management. Everything else supports those two foundations.
No. Our primary focus is swing trade setups, positions held for days to weeks. There’s an active group of day traders in Discord who trade our setups on shorter timeframes, but every idea is presented as a swing trade first. You decide which timeframe fits your personality.
If you’re looking for full-time day trading education, Alphatrends isn’t the right fit.
No. Alphatrends is not an options service, and we don’t make specific leveraged ETF calls either. Both carry unique risks that make them inappropriate for many traders.
Brian will occasionally mention that he’s considering options on a specific trade, and the End-of-Day video covers major index ETFs whose levels can be applied to leveraged products, but neither is central to what we teach.
Alphatrends is best suited for traders with at least a year of real-money experience.
If you’re just getting started, we’d recommend beginning with Brian’s books and the Intro to Stock Trading course, then joining the membership once you have the fundamentals down.
Every trading day, Brian and Andy post the setups, the reasoning, and the risk parameters that come out of this exact framework. Members watch it play out live, ask questions in Discord, and go deeper in monthly seminars.
