Narrowing the Playing Field
For many of us the weekends are a good time to sit down and look for new opportunities away from the hustle and bustle of market hours. I personally do it every weekend and spend too many hours looking for the best set ups to trade in the coming week. By the look of the streams on StockTwits.com I am not alone in this weekly quest. Different traders use different methods to find these ideas. With the technology today there are countless scanners available. Finviz.com and stockfetcher.com are a couple of free scanners that perform well. A subscription to Stockcharts.com gives you another great tool. I personally use the scanner in Metastock to build more customized scans using my RS measures among others. These are great ways do an initial funneling of the large universe of stocks to chose from.
Then on the other side you have the pure chart guys who look through hundreds of charts looking for the best setups not wanting to miss a good chart because the scanner doesn’t like it. These are more rare today, one of the best I know is @harmongreg who uses the H2i (Harmon two eyes) scanner looking through over 1000 charts a weekend to find the best picks. I fall somewhere in between. I run different scans to get a feel for where things are. From there I go top down through the sectors on my RS sector list that make up the GT500 index. After all this is done, my biggest problem does not seem to be finding the set ups, but narrowing them down to the best 5-15.
I am a chart reader by nature, so when I go through and look at each chart I will read the story and look for the next probable move, how it is likely to set up and what to look for when its breaking. All fine and good except when I end the review Sunday evening with notes on 50 to 100+ names that could be traded. And there is no way I can follow that many and expect to get anything done. I am working at this point on honing my focus on what I consider the strongest looking chart pattern and what to expect out of it. In reality though it doesn’t even have to be the best pattern, just one I know has a good track record of success. All I really need is the 5-15 to stalk and I bet that will provide more opportunities than I can trade. And that is the quest starting now…narrowing things down and realizing the solution is not belaboring the BEST set ups, but finding enough that look very workable and follow them like a hawk.
I am sure there are ways y’all narrow the field. I would love to have a discussion about them in comments as I can always use new ideas to improve my methods.
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