Alternative Analysis Methods: Moving Averages, Trend Lines, and Dogs of the Dow

I’ve always believed that the market speaks in many languages, and over the years I’ve learned to recognize some of its dialects—fundamental data, earnings, drawdowns, long-term return profiles. But every so often, my son reminds me of the rhythms I sometimes overlook, the more technical voices that trace the market’s movements like a heartbeat on a screen. He talks to me about Bitcoin and its 200-day simple moving average, how he watches it drift above and below that line as though it’s revealing some secret message. And in a way, maybe it is.

I used to resist these methods. Moving averages felt too abstract, trend lines too reductive, the Dogs of the Dow too quaint. But time has softened those edges in me. I’ve realized that these approaches don’t replace the deeper analysis—they complement it. Each one offers another way of seeing, another angle of truth.

The 200-day moving average, for instance, has become something of a compass for many investors. It smooths out the noise, stripping away the chaos of daily volatility and revealing the shape of a stock’s long-term direction. I used to think it was too simple, too mechanical—until I began watching how faithfully many companies hovered around that line, how crossings above or below it often marked subtle shifts in sentiment. Not certainties, just murmurs. But sometimes a murmur is enough to remind us that the market moves with a rhythm more stable than we assume.

Trend lines, too, carry their own quiet wisdom. They feel almost artistic to me—lines drawn not to constrain but to understand. A trend line doesn’t tell us where a stock must go; it tells us how it has behaved, the slope of its journey, the persistence of its direction. I’ve come to appreciate the gentle discipline of these lines. They remind me to look not just at numbers but at movement, the subtle tilts that suggest whether a stock is climbing with conviction or drifting with uncertainty.

And then there’s the Dogs of the Dow, an old-fashioned strategy that almost feels like advice passed down from a grandfather sitting on a porch swing. Take the highest-yielding stocks in the Dow, invest in them at the start of the year, and let time do the rest. At first glance, it seems too simple to belong in modern markets. But simplicity has its own kind of wisdom. The Dogs strategy reminds me that sometimes the market’s largest, most stable companies offer better opportunities than the shiny new names we chase for excitement.

Each of these methods—moving averages, trend lines, the Dogs—feels like a different kind of question asked of the market. A moving average asks, Where is the momentum carrying us?
A trend line asks, What direction has endured?
The Dogs of the Dow ask, Where has value been overlooked?

None of them offer certainty. But all of them offer perspective.

When I explained this to my son, he listened with that subtle intensity he gets when he’s trying to weave new ideas into his understanding. I could see him beginning to grasp something that took me years to accept: that no single method holds the whole truth. Investing isn’t about finding the one perfect tool—it’s about building a toolkit, a way of seeing the market from multiple angles until the picture feels honest.

What I wish for him, and for anyone learning this craft, is an openness to these methods. Not a blind faith, but a willingness to let each one teach something. To see technical indicators not as rigid rules but as quiet companions, suggesting patterns we may have missed.

In the end, all analysis methods—simple or complex, traditional or modern—are just ways of paying attention.
And the more ways we learn to listen, the more clearly the market begins to speak.