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.
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.
For a non-programmer, check out StockTA.com for some free technical screens, as well as Prophet.net and Stockcharts.com.
@Brad, it’s my code. I’ve heard stockcharts lets you do pretty sophisticated scans, but I’ve never used them.
[...] You can see in my video about my daily trading prep, I incorporate the highchartpatterns picks into my nightly routine. I have plenty of my own scans and ideas, but there are days when they make a good back-up for me. Sometimes, the stocks on my scans just aren’t ready to break out, so it’s good to have another set of ideas to work with. Other times (like last night!) I got tied up and didn’t even have time to run my scans. [...]
[...] My Typical “Work” Week On average, I trade about 4 days a week. When I trade, I actively watch the markets for about 4.5 hours, and set alerts to pull me back in if something comes up later. You can see from my video on my nightly trade prep that I spend maybe a half-hour each night on preparations. So, that adds up to 20 hours of dedicated work I put into trading per week. At my old job, it wasn’t unusual to do 20 hours of overtime most weeks, on top of the normal 40 hours. And, since a lot of my “work” hours are basically just waiting for opportunities to arise, I have a lot of freedom to multitask. Because of this flexibility, and the fact that I work at home, I can: [...]
what software do you use for scans
this is for thelay person
i found metastockto be too complicated
thanks
mohan
It’s custom software I wrote.