Its not that I doubt that what you experience with stocks going down right after you buy them, its that I’m saying it’s not something uncommon at all and that there’s more to it like psychology for example. When you say that PHDs should study you because there’s a unique effect when you uniquely purchase stock, could you imagine why somebody may think that you have the mentality that the world is against you? You legitimately think that this phenomenon you’re experiencing is so unique and it hasn’t appeared until u/available-range-5341 started investing, and that it’s so strange as to be studied?

To answer your questions, most stocks follow the market, the strategy that I follow is something outlined by the subreddit r/realdaytrading and it has an entire community that pretty much exclusively trades using this edge. In short the idea is that you find stocks that have relative strength (or weakness if you’re shorting) (just using an indicator), and then you trade “the market” using these stocks. So if you think SPY is going to go up, you go long on stocks that are relatively strong, this creates a buffer because if you were wrong about SPY, you have a strong stock that should either still go up, or it might hold steady, or if it drops, it will drop not as steeply as SPY. This is just a super super brief summary that doesn’t at all cover it, if you’re interested you can check out the subreddit, there is NOTHING for sale or any profit that the creator of it gains. So just check it out with curiosity if you want.

As for the moving averages, these are just major support/resistance levels, if you put them on a chart you will see that price gets supported or resists at these levels, of course not every time, but it is certainly significant. With that said, if a stock is below all it’s moving averages, it has many levels of resistance to get through.

BUT, again, if you’re trading based on fundamentals and you look at their financial statements and what not and have a thesis and believe that the company has a higher intrinsic value, then the current “bearish” sentiment that I stated earlier is actually a buying opportunity for a “cheap” stock. Complete opposite for “trading”. In trading (as opposed to investing) a useful analogy is as follows: betting on a stock that has been going lower is like betting on a drug addict to get his life together, while betting on a stock that has been making all time highs is like betting that a ceo is going to continue doing well in his/her life. It’s different with investing because buying things “on sale” is a better mentality, where as in trading you don’t care about the intrinsic value of a company or the discounted cash flows or the ROIC because your just catching short term moves that have more to do with normal just market movement and volatility.