StockCharts Support Forum

[Quasi]

Re: Rolandb, Intra Day scan for movers....

Quasi or others may have this answer. Now that SC has sort of intraday scans is it possible to get the movers? If so I guess there is no way to sort.

Well I would say yes you can, but its just a little different than FinViz. First I have to say if you like the point and click screener method with very little option to customize and with no option to change the chart output, then FinViz is for you. Personally I like the Stockcharts version as I like to have full control of the scan and the output, however I agree to get this flexibility you may have to push a couple more keys. For me I'm used to it so I can do it without really even thinking about it.

For comparison I looked at FinViz yesterday and found that they do have scans on price which will work intra day and they also have a relative volume scan which will also work intraday. Now neither one will work on anything but daily period time frames, ie neither one will let you scan based on 1, 3, 5, 10, 15, 30 or 60 min time frames. (This would require a data base many 100's of time larger, and it has to be in RAM not on a disc and much more processing power would be required)

Both scan systems work on a daily data base (O, H, L, C & Vol), with the current intra values today just being whatever the last values happen to be. So for anything that is based on price this is not a problem, but anything based on volume is a problem.

Volume is cumulative thru the day, ie you can't directly compare the total volume at 10:30 AM to the total volume yesterday or a vol average. So what FinViz does with their relative volume is to compare the current daily volume against a 3 month daily ave volume which has been intraday adjusted, ie if we are 1/2 way thru the day they compare todays volume against 1/2 of the 3 month daily ave volume. At Stockcharts we can do the same thing with our own custom scan, by just adding how far we are into the trading day. Yes its a small extra step but we now have full control over a custom scan with many more options available.

Now to do this FinViz assume the volume pattern thru the day is linear, which is not true for most stocks, volume is usually greater around the open / close periods, but its just the easiest way to do it and for this example we'll use the same method. Although with the SC custom scan you could adjust the inputs such that the volume could be skewed to whatever daily curve you wanted.

So here's the scan I set up at FinViz for this example; Nasdaq stocks, price between $10-20, Average Volume over 100K, and relative volume over 5. (note they state the relative volume is compared to a daily 3 month - we'll assume its a SMA not an EMA, for ave daily volume they just say its average - we'll assume its a daily 3 month average). Here's a link to the scan page.

http://finviz.com/screener.ashx?v=111&f=exch_nasd,sh_avgvol_o100,sh_price_10to20,sh_relvol_o5

So now here's the SC version I've written in the advanced scan engine because we need to use math functions. So for the daily 3 month average I will use a 60 day SMA ave (approx 20 trading days per month). When comparing todays volume to the SMA-60 volume I will pro-rate it for the time of day, ie minutes into the trading day divided by total minutes per trading day ( 6.5 hours which is 390 minutes). Then I multiply that value by 5 as I wanted todays current volume to be greater than 5 times the pro-rated average volume.

[type = stock]
and [country is US]
and [exchange is Nasdaq]
and [ close > 10] and [close < 20]
and [ sma(60, volume) > 100000]
and [Volume > sma(60,volume) * [90/390] *5 ]

I then ran the scan on both systems, Monday morning Nov 8th at 11:00 AM, (90 mins into the trading day) and here are the results. I checked the data on all stocks and they all met the required criteria. However I did notice that FinViz missed several stocks that SC picked up, and I can't figure out why FinViz missed them as I'm sure they must be in there data base.

Finviz          Stockcharts 
 AERL		AERL 
 		ATPG 
 		CROX 
 DDIC		DDIC 
 		DXCM 
 		JDSU 
 SIGA		SIGA 
 SWIR		SWIR 
 TGA		TGA 
 VICR		VICR

Now that I've run the scan the output is a list of the stocks, so with one click I dump them into my "00Temp" folder (its always the default folder as its always at the top of my list). This brings up my "Summary" screen which has the stocks sorted by default - gainers to losers. I can then click on any column and change the sort order. Or one more click and I'm in CandleGlance view looking at all the charts side by side. Or I can click the "10 per Page" view and scroll thru them with whatever I've set as my default settings for this scan, or change them to whatever chart settings I want.

So in summary YES we can do in Stockcharts what FinViz can do and I think its worth the few extra key strokes to be able to do it better.

hope this give you some new ideas, happy trading.

Quasi