As a consumer of financial news who is by no means an expert, I find that all the analysis can become a bit overwhelming. I took economics in college. I understand basic principles. But, do I want to spend the time learning how to technically analyze the stock market, day in and day out? No. And I’m fine with that. What I'm not fine with is when people make it seem like the only way to make money is by knowing exactly how to read charts. Apparently right before YUM! (NYSE: YUM) brands recent downturn, they showed a “death cross” that should have signaled every smart person to run for the hills. The short term moving average fell below the long term moving average. I guess that signaled the Jim Cramers of the world to lose their minds. To me, it’s French. Which I was also really bad at. The problem here is that I can’t sweet talk the teacher and give her chocolates to increase my chances of doing better. I’d have to do a deep dive into stock market analysis, which I am not interested in doing. So, what hope is there for a person like me? Is it a life of boring old index funds, but (semi) guaranteed returns? That’s one option. And I’d like to stand up for all the people that choose it. Because my research has led me to believe that this “death cross” is not as predictive as the experts make it out to be. It seems to me that it only works sporadically. The whole venture reminds me of how sports pundits will cite stats about how teams have performed in night games, dating back to like 1954. How is the performance of Jim Brown relevant to how Johnny Manziel is going to do in 2015? They barely had the forward pass back then! Now, I’m sure there are a million really smart people using technical analysis to their advantage. But for the mainstream financial media to chide me because I missed out on some nebulous “death cross” opportunity seems unfair. In my view, anyone owning stocks knows the risk, and not everyone has to nail every move perfectly to be able to make money.