Short-term investors rely on volatility and overall stock trends when it comes to making money. It goes without saying that people who want to trade full time will have to learn technical analysis. Armed with this knowledge, traders will be able to execute proper trades and manipulate their positions in such a way to take advantage of short-term profit opportunities. In this regard, short-term patterns become one of the trader's most heavily used tools.

Many investors who are just learning technical analysis will make short-term investment decisions based on reliable, longer-term patterns such as the head and shoulders top discussed elsewhere in this series. The difficulty with such a strategy is that short-term trades based on long-term patterns will typically not yield the desired gains.