Q&A Part II

Q)

How do you select and organize from so many symbols and timeframes to monitor so many possible positions and then ultimately pull the trigger?

How does it differ for scalps vs. swings?

How do you narrow down the world of stocks and other assets to a set that you want to monitor, from month to month, week to week, day to day, and hour to hour?

A)

It really depends upon what time frame I am monitoring for setups on. For instance, if I am looking for position trades I first begin with a lot of purely manual scanning. TeleCharts is a great program for this. I just use basic volume and price scans to eliminate securities which are not active enough or are too cheap or too expensive to be of interest. I prefer stocks over $15, especially for short, where over $30 tends to be best, but will sometimes go down to $7 if it is a long. I want it to trade 300k average daily volume over the past 30 days. Once I have a list, I try to narrow that down to about 20 stocks and then will post them in a market minder on my charting platform and set alerts at key price support or resistance levels on my favorites and then just monitor the others around mid-week and again on the weekend. I repeat this for swingtrades, but will often check though a few times throughout the day for intraday pattern development.

On daytrades I have a bit different approach. I use scans for top percentage and price gainers and losers, as well as gaps going into the open and then narrow those down to about 5-8 stocks to keep an eye on throughout the day, usually only about 2-3 to watch into the open. I then scan through these all day and add new stocks to my market minder as I go back and keep scanning the larger gainers and losers lists to add to my list. I then keep flipping through my list and alternate watching it with scanning for other potential setups. On stocks which are nearing trigger prices I will put up a small chart to watch the pattern development so that I can catch it quickly as it gets going. I don't use alarms as much for intraday setups, since once a channel breaks it means I missed the best entry, but there are always exceptions.