Ryan,

When I first started, I tried trading on fundamentals but I failed miserably - so your experience is not unique. And then I had an epiphany. Every bit of fundamental information that the small investor could discover about a stock is available to every other investor. While not every individual does DD, the big boys do. Furthermore, institutional investors often hire analyists to provide detailed reports which are not available to the little guys. For most stocks, there's just no way for a small investor to know the fundamentals as well as the pros.

There's another complication, it's not just the results (earnings, drilling, whatever), but whether they are better or worse than expecations. Lots of "good" drilling results or earnings are sold off because the big investors (rightly or wrongly) expected better. So you have to know what others are expecting, as well.

I started trading just on technicals, and eventually I learned enough to make money consistently. Of course it doesn't work perfectly - There are always surprises and unknowns lurking out there. My success rate is usually in the 60-65% range - the really good TA guys do about 70%+, but even for them, it's hard to do much better than that.

Why would technical trading work? Because it's based on human nature (fear/greed), and that doesn't change much. In the short/intermediate term, stocks run on sentiment and liquidity. Fortunately, a lot of people think technical trading is voodoo - which is good, because it probably wouldn't work if everyone did it.

Re TKO: I think of the trendline as the slope of the mountain. While it did have a higher peak in January, as long as it doesn't break its uptrend, it's still climbing the mountain. I still like it, even though I don't own it right now.