My Daily Stock Trading Preparations

Posted on September 29th, 2006
Written by Richard
Posted in: N/A (old archives)

The nightly ritual that prepares me to (usually not) trade the next day.

Basically, I run a few scans (one of them is posted to MtM every day, so you should know what they basically look like). I collect the picks from highchartpatterns.com, where I am a subscriber. I sometimes also collect some stocks from other blogs’ watchlists. Then, I put them all in a list on my trading platform and glance briefly at all the stocks. I just try to make an immediate subjective determination of how “clean” or “pretty” or “straightforward” the chart is. I jot down the ones I think are worth following. After 10 to 15 minutes, I’ve looked at around 50 stocks, and I’ve decided to follow probably 5 to 10 closely the next day.

I tend to use the 3-month daily chart for my initial look, but if I am worried about the horizon effect, I jump to the 1-year weekly chart to confirm that all is well with the stock. I try to only pick the clearest stocks from the set, that are generally trending in the direction that I think their technical patterns are pointing. Since, I’m daytrading, if the trend on the weekly chart is going against me, I don’t sweat that too much, but I’d rather everything be in synch.

Comments

  • It's custom software I wrote.
  • mohan
    what software do you use for scans
    this is for thelay person
    i found metastockto be too complicated
    thanks
    mohan
  • @Brad, it's my code. I've heard stockcharts lets you do pretty sophisticated scans, but I've never used them.
  • ExEngineer
    For a non-programmer, check out StockTA.com for some free technical screens, as well as Prophet.net and Stockcharts.com.
  • How could I--a nonprogrammer--run a scan such as your "30-day high" scan? Do you use an easily available program for this or did you write your own code? I just don't know where to get started with something like that. Any ideas?

    Thanks.
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