Brian Shannon: The Trader Who Made Anchored VWAP a Household Indicator

Brian Shannon, CMT, founded Alphatrends in 2006 and has been one of the most influential technical-analysis educators in the U.S. retail trading world for two decades. He discovered the Anchored VWAP indicator in 2003 when essentially nobody else was using it, popularized it through his 2023 bestseller, and trained a remarkable fraction of named retail traders along the way — about a third of the traders profiled in the StockTwits Edge book pointed to Shannon as their most influential mentor.

Brian Shannon, CMT Born Nov 16, 1967 · Founder, Alphatrends · Author, two foundational TA books Photo: alphatrends.net

The Snapshot

Brian Shannon is the technical-analyst-educator other technical analysts cite. Born November 16, 1967, raised in Andover, Massachusetts after being born in Denver, graduated from Merrimack College, earned the Chartered Market Technician (CMT) designation, served as Head of Research and Training for MarketWise before founding Alphatrends in 2006. He's authored two of the more durable technical analysis books in print — Technical Analysis Using Multiple Timeframes (2008) and Maximum Trading Gains With Anchored VWAP (2023), the latter an instant bestseller — and has built one of the longer-running daily-video swing trading analysis services on the internet. CMT Association

For day traders, Shannon occupies a slightly different shelf than the high-frequency intraday names in our broader retail trader coverage. His primary time frame is swing trading — typically days to weeks — and he uses an explicit multiple-timeframe approach that overlays weekly, daily, 30-minute, 15-minute, and 5-minute charts simultaneously. But the tools he's popularized, especially Anchored VWAP, have become foundational across all time frames including pure day trading. The AVWAP indicator now appears on essentially every modern charting platform with Shannon's exact specification, which is unusual — most technical indicators get adapted and renamed over time, but AVWAP retained Shannon's original framing because he was first to publish a comprehensive methodology around it. Alphatrends

Andover to MarketWise

Shannon was born November 16, 1967 in Denver, Colorado, and raised in Andover, Massachusetts. He attended Merrimack College, started trading in the early 1990s, and by the mid-1990s was committed to technical analysis as his primary analytical framework. He eventually earned the Chartered Market Technician designation through the CMT Association — a credential that requires passing three levels of examinations on technical analysis theory and application and that distinguishes practitioner technicians from the broader population of self-taught chartists. Wikipedia (Brian Shannon)

Before founding his own business, Shannon served as Head of Research and Training for MarketWise — a trader-training operation that produced an unusual fraction of named retail traders who went on to successful public careers. The MarketWise role gave Shannon direct daily teaching experience with hundreds of aspiring traders over multiple years, which is the kind of pedagogical mileage that very few technical analysts ever accumulate. The teaching experience translated directly into the structural clarity of his subsequent books — they read like distilled-from-classroom material because that's largely what they are. Amazon (Shannon author page)

Founding Alphatrends (2006)

In 2006, Shannon founded Alphatrends as a daily technical-analysis service providing market commentary, individual stock analysis, and educational content for swing traders. The service has been continuously in operation for almost twenty years, which is unusual longevity in the retail trading-education space. The structural format — daily video updates analyzing the broader market and specific tickers, with members-only deeper content and live webinars — has been stable enough that the format itself has become a template that many subsequent retail-trading-education businesses have copied. Alphatrends

Technical Analysis Using Multiple Timeframes (2008)

Shannon published his first book, Technical Analysis Using Multiple Timeframes, in 2008. The book's central argument is one that's now widely accepted in the technical-analysis community but was less universally articulated when Shannon wrote it: that trade decisions should be made by analyzing multiple timeframes simultaneously rather than within a single timeframe in isolation. The framework: identify the primary trend on the weekly chart, the intermediate trend on the daily chart, the trade setup on the 30/15-minute charts, and the entry trigger on the 5-minute chart. A high-probability trade is one where all four timeframes are aligned in the same direction. Amazon

The book also introduced what became the Shannon framework around market stages — the four-phase cycle (accumulation, markup, distribution, markdown) that stocks tend to move through, originally articulated by Richard Wyckoff a century earlier but updated by Shannon into a practical trading framework. The book has been continuously in print since 2008 and has become foundational reading across the broader trading education canon. Risk management is treated as the central topic throughout, with Shannon's repeated framing that "risk management is Job One" — a phrase that has become his signature line in interviews and educational content. Wikipedia

The Anchored VWAP Discovery

The Anchored VWAP story is the part of Shannon's career that has put him in the modern technical-analysis pantheon. Volume Weighted Average Price (VWAP) had existed for years as an institutional execution benchmark — large institutional traders use it to gauge whether their fills are better or worse than the volume-weighted average over a session. What hadn't existed in widespread retail use was the concept of anchoring the VWAP calculation to a specific significant historical event (a major high, a major low, an earnings report, an IPO, a Fed announcement) rather than to the start of the trading session. Shannon discovered the AVWAP tool in 2003 and recognized its analytical value where almost nobody else had. Amazon

The analytical insight is precise: at any point on a chart, the AVWAP from a specific anchor tells you the average price paid by all participants since that anchor — meaning, in aggregate, whether the average buyer or seller from that reference point is currently in a winning or losing position. If price is above the AVWAP from a prior high, the average participant who entered at or near that high is now in a winning position; the implication is that supply pressure from those participants is reduced. If price is below the AVWAP from a prior low, the average participant who bought near that low is now in a losing position; the implication is that those participants are more likely to sell on the next bounce. The tool turns aggregated participant psychology into a single chartable line. Alphatrends (AVWAP book)

Maximum Trading Gains With Anchored VWAP (2023)

Twenty years after first finding the AVWAP tool, Shannon published Maximum Trading Gains With Anchored VWAP in 2023. The book is the result of decades of practical application — over 140 full-color technical analysis charts demonstrating the tool's application across specific situations including IPO trades, short squeeze candidates, breakouts and pullbacks, four different types of gaps, and short sales. The book became an instant bestseller and has been cited as a foundational text on the AVWAP indicator across the modern technical-analysis community. Amazon (Maximum Trading Gains)

The book also reinforces what Shannon has been teaching for two decades: don't buy the dip, don't buy the breakout — buy strength after the dip when the AVWAP from the previous high is taken out, because that's the moment where the average participant from the prior peak is in a winning position and supply pressure is structurally reduced. The framing is mechanically clearer than the typical "buy the dip" or "buy the breakout" advice, because AVWAP provides a specific, chartable level that defines whether the dip has actually been reclaimed in a meaningful sense. The technique has been adopted across the modern technical-analysis ecosystem as a refinement of cruder pullback-trading frameworks. Brian Shannon's X feed

The Trading Methodology

Shannon's actual methodology integrates the multiple-timeframe framework with the AVWAP tool and a four-stage market structure overlay. The simultaneous use of five timeframes (weekly, daily, 30-minute, 15-minute, 5-minute) lets him see the interplay between longer-term trends and shorter-term setups in a way that single-timeframe analysis can't capture. The AVWAP overlays on each timeframe tell him whether the average participant from key reference events is currently winning or losing. The stage overlay (accumulation/markup/distribution/markdown) tells him which side of the supply-demand cycle the broader stock is currently in. Alphatrends

The Mentorship Legacy

One of the more striking statements about Shannon's influence comes from Howard Lindzon's The StockTwits Edge, which profiled multiple named traders. By Lindzon's own count, approximately one-third of the traders featured in the book pointed to Brian Shannon as the mentor who had the biggest impact on their careers. The proportion is unusual — most retail trading educators have devoted followings, but few can claim that fraction of named successful traders trace their development directly back to them. The pattern is similar across the broader retail technical-analysis community: when serious working traders are asked which educator shaped their thinking most, Shannon's name appears with frequency that exceeds what his public profile alone would predict. Amazon (author page)

The reason for the outsized influence is partly the durability of his methodology and partly the structural format of Alphatrends — daily video analysis over twenty years builds parasocial educational depth in a way that occasional podcast appearances don't. Members of Alphatrends have watched Shannon analyze thousands of charts in real time, react to dozens of major market events as they happened, and demonstrate the methodology under live conditions across multiple regimes. That accumulated demonstration is closer to apprenticeship than to typical paid trading education, and it shows in the consistency of the framework his alumni take into their own careers. Alphatrends

What Traders Can Actually Learn From This

The first lesson from Shannon's career is the value of the multiple-timeframe framework. The instinct of most retail traders is to pick a single timeframe (typically too short — the 5-minute or 15-minute chart) and analyze only within it. Shannon's framework forces simultaneous analysis across five timeframes, which produces qualitatively better trade selection because it filters out setups that look good in isolation but conflict with longer-term structure. The framework is computationally manageable on any modern charting platform and requires no special software; the constraint is the discipline to do the multi-timeframe analysis on every trade rather than skipping it under time pressure.

The second lesson is the Anchored VWAP itself. The tool turns a piece of information traders intuitively know is true — the average buyer from a specific reference event is in a specific aggregate P&L position right now — into a chartable line you can actually use. The implication is mechanical: when price reclaims AVWAP from a prior high, the supply pressure from buyers near that high is structurally reduced; when price loses AVWAP from a prior low, the relief from sellers near that low is removed. The "don't buy the dip, buy strength after the dip when AVWAP from the prior high is taken out" framework is one of the cleaner mechanical rules in modern technical analysis, and it's directly portable to any time frame and any instrument.

The third lesson is the durability of the methodology. Shannon's framework hasn't required regime-specific reinvention to remain relevant across twenty years of dramatically different market conditions. The reason is that the framework is grounded in structural market dynamics (supply and demand, participant positioning, multi-timeframe trend alignment) rather than period-specific patterns (specific volatility regimes, specific market structures, specific economic conditions). Frameworks that require regime-specific reinvention typically aren't frameworks; they're regime-specific tactics dressed up as frameworks. The lesson for serious traders: prefer methodologies that have demonstrated durability across regimes over methodologies that have produced spectacular results in one regime and untested results in others.

Frequently Asked Questions

Disclosure: This article is editorial and contains no affiliate links. Trading involves substantial risk of loss. Brian Shannon's published methodology is based on technical analysis principles that have demonstrated durability across multiple market regimes; specific performance figures for his personal trading are not publicly audited in the regulatory sense. The Anchored VWAP indicator he popularized is available on essentially every modern charting platform.