DIS: How to make a stock screener - Lesson 3 - How to make a good Watch List
I know...I know.... this lesson was supposed to be about using MACD in a query. I have been playing around with this for a few weeks and I have not come up with a satisfying result.
However I started to think of using a StockFetcher query for the creation / Maintenance / viewing of a watch list.
If you are like me, you have seen or played a really nice stock that has fallen on hard times. So you say to yourself...I shall put it on my watch list and view it off and on to see if it is worth coming back in.
The problem is that after 2-4 weeks of looking at this stock(s) you become bored with seeing nothing happening and you stop being as diligent about keeping tabs on the stock. Then after a few months you look at it and see that the stock finally took off a couple of weeks previous and you missed a golden opportunity.
Been there.....done that..... own the T-shirt.
However, I have worked out an easy query that is easy to update with new stocks and will return only those with good prospects when you run the query. There are other uses for this type of query but we will build it first for this application.
In the fantasy American Portfolio the stocks within the portfolio have been pretty stable since August. They include:
Seaspan Corp [SSW]
Barrick Gold Corp [GOLD]
Algonquin Power & Utilities [AQN]
BP Prudhoe Royalty Trust [BPT]
Cohu Corp [COHU]
Photronics Inc [PLAB]
Plus one that was recommended by Robert F. But never put in the portfolio
Brooks - PRI Automation Inc. [BRKS]
Let us build a query that will "Watch" these stocks... even though two of them [AQN] and [COHU] are still active in the portfolio.
The first step is to group only these stocks for analysis. This is easy using this statement
/* Stock Watch Query*/
apply to symlist (SSW,GOLD,AQN,BPT,COHU,PLAB,BRKS) Easy, eh! If you have more stocks that you want to monitor simply add their tickers (comma delimited) to the list. Remember the "/*.....*/" around words makes them a comment statement.
Now start adding restrictions to the search
/* Stock Watch Query*/
apply to symlist (SSW,GOLD,AQN,BPT,COHU,PLAB,BRKS)
Show stocks where Slow Stochastic(30,3) %K above 80
and FI(30) > 0
and RSI(30) > 60
And close is between 5 and 60
Now I added the Closing price restriction but it really is not necessary unless you have a large number of stocks in the list and you are only interested in stocks in a certain price range.... If so just change "5 and 60" to whatever range you want.... leaving this line out of the query will test all of the stocks in the list.
To finish the query simply add items that define what parameters you want to see mini charts of
/* Stock Watch Query*/
apply to symlist (SSW,GOLD,AQN,BPT,COHU,PLAB,BRKS)
Show stocks where Slow Stochastic(30,3) %K above 80
and FI(30) > 0
and RSI(30) > 60
and close is between 5 and 60
Draw Slow Stochastic(30,3) %K
Draw MACD(12,26,9)
Draw bollinger band(20,2)
Now first save this query to a Notebook or other text file...I title my file "Good Queries" and keep adding different queries as I make them.
then open StockFetcher and open the NEW FILTER TAB and paste the Stock Watch query into the yellow box.
Press <Fetch Stocks> and see if any stocks are returned.
Right now only one stock is returned (remember it will only return 5 in the free version... if there are more then 5 returned you just narrow the "close " range until you see 5 stocks then increase the range and run the query again to see more.
Right now only Algonquin Power and Utilites is returned
Of course, we already have this stock in the portfolio but it serves as an example.
Conclusion
This query saves a lot of time and boredom from looking at stocks that are not ready to be bought.
Knowing me, I will probably tinker with the query to make it pick stocks closer to the breakout from a Bollie squeeze.... but this is fine for now.
UE
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