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Strategies & Market Trends : DAYTRADING Fundamentals -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MKT_entropy who wrote (13562)	8/15/2001 4:36:43 PM
From: hypostomus	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 18137

Sorry to be so slow in responding. I was busy proving myself wrong in the market. You are very astute to note that such selection criteria can result in longer holds than 4 days. Some of those stocks will beat the market for a rally/dip/rally cycle, but almost none of them survive the second dip. The trouble is that those with longevity typically are rising 0.4% a day, so the entry risk persists a couple of days, whereas the faster movers I like rise at 0.8% or better per day and the risk is zippo if the pattern holds the next day, but they don't survive as long. Hence my 4 day hold test. It may be by-the-book, but all the books I read didn't sink in until I had gotten killed repeatedly going against the index and buying stocks without rigorous reward/risk analysis. All the charts in those pretty books neglect to show you what the index was doing at the time the great patterns unfolded. I am such a lousy exiter (I panic during retracements) that I use a pattern failure stop and stand back. With a stairstepping stock (especially a gapper) you can set the stops pretty tight - if you get stopped out, you really wanted out. Qoutes Plus 2 is only $25 a month, which for me as a learner is a good value. It is reliable and accurate. The customer service is great and there is an active, helpful Yahoo group. The code is easy to use, especially if you ever programmed in Basic. The code to find good stocks is absurdly simple. Tradestation it ain't, but you can backtest with it in a crude fashion. Of course for execution timing you need a good realtime service during the day, for which I use NexTrend at $80 a month, also I think the best value at the price. All depends on what you want to do. Most of my assets are in 401K's, so making decisions this afternoon based on analysis of yesterday's closing data augmented by today's action is timely enough.