Finding Stocks with Mojo using Trade-Ideas

Recently there has been some great dialogue between the folks at Trade-Ideas and some traders on Twitter. Trade-Ideas has so many different uses, and the company is doing a great job of highlighting some examples of custom scans recently on their blog. While I have talked in great detail before on how I am using Trade-Ideas to automate my trading in conjunction with auto trading software from stocktickr.com, I also use the scanner to alert me for certain market behavior, such as helping me find "stocks in play".

I've been mentioning some of the signals I get from that particular scan, which I have named "Stocks with Mojo" on my Twitter feed. I decided to share how I configured this alert to show some of the different alerts and filters available. The basic gist of this filter is to scan for stocks showing an unusual increase in trading interest in a stock, therefore finding any stocks in play. Usually the stocks that show up have released earnings, or news and have a large increase in volume. I don't make any direct trading decisions on these alerts, and I haven't found a way to reliably trade this automatically, due to the type of alert it is (David or Dan, you are more than welcome to improve or modify it and try ;-), and I think there is promise holding as a swing). What I typically do is put any stocks I find on my daily watchlist, and watch them intraday. Most of these will offer some type of pullback or breakout entry at some point in the day, and with the large increase in volume they are less susceptible to manipulation or program trading.

While I modified this scan to only find stocks going up (with an interest towards automating it), you can easily remove some of the filters to include all stocks showing "mojo". Here is a screen shot showing some of the alerts it has given over the past few days. I only get a few per day, so this is not a noisy scan.

The actual alert I use is unusual number of prints. This is not direction specific as it stands, and only looks for unusual activity based on how many prints are going off.

The filters I use are as follows:

Minimum Price = $10

Minimum Daily Volume = 300,000

Minimum Volume Today = 150%

Minimum Volatility = .07%

Minimum Options Volume today = 200%

The rest of the filters below are what I used to isolate stocks trending higher and I used a combination of intraday and daily data filters.These could be reversed or eliminated altogether depending on what you are looking for. This is an example of one way to refine your alert in Trade-Ideas.

Minimum up from the close = .01 - Looking for stock up from close

Minimum up from the open = .01 - Also want stock to be up from open

Minimum position in previous daily range = 99% - Also want stock close to or above previous HIGH

Minimum up from 8 period sma (15m) = .01% - Also want stock to be trending higher intraday

Minimum Count = 3 - Also want it to happen 3 times to eliminate a single program trade


The easy way to replicate this alert is to use the collaborate feature. Right click in an alert window and click collaborate. Replace the code with the following:

http://www.trade-ideas.com/View.php?O=40000000000000000000000000000000_1D_0&QUNOP=3&Min15SmaLa8=0.01&MinCount=3&MinFCD=0.01&MinFOD=0.1&MinPCPV=200&MinPV=150&MinPrice=10&MinRPD=99&MinVWVP=0.07&MinVol=300000&WN=Stocks+with+Mojo

This will configure the alert just as described above.

Again, this is not necessarily the best scan in the world, but I thought it was a good way to show some of the versatility of the scanner and to show some creative uses for it. If anyone decides to use it or improve it, feel free to let me know how it goes.

Good Trading,


Joey