I mostly trade Options - 70% day trades and then 15% short term trades and 15% longer. Can anyone recommend the best scanner(s) used to find stocks with breakouts while they're happening? I'm looking around and see Scanz, FinBrain, Stock Charts, Stock-screener.org, StockMonitor, etc.. Thanks
I have used scanz.com for years (formerly known as equityfeed). As with any scanner you will have to define what a "breakout" is for your purposes. I have found it to be highly effective when used to scan a watchlist that I myself have selected. I have scans running that tell me which are breaking out and which have pulled back to support. It also has a breakout scanner that I run all day long. I typically set it just to tell me which stocks on my list are hitting new high of day and those hitting new low of day. But I do run it for 52 week high breakouts down to 20 day high breakouts. Again, you will get the best bang for the buck if you construct the watch list and then point the program to scan your watch list. For example here is the result of one of my scans when scanning the entire market rather than my own watchlists: Pointing at the general market, it found 760 stocks meeting my criteria, and many of them junk names. Not the scanner's fault by any means, and I could tighten up the criteria and weed out much of the garbage. But I do not need to tighten the criteria because I assemble my own watchlists, which "pre-sorts" the market for me (and for scanz). Here is the result when run against my list of about 50 stocks I follow daily: In this scan it came up with 12 candidates. Today I traded TSLA, LAZR, NFLX, and SPOT. I also keep a list of around 200 other tickers that are not quite ready for prime time, and once one does start acting frisky, I move it to the main list. Meanwhile stocks from the main list that become broken are moved to a smaller list for potential shorts or, at the very least, for rehab, e.g. a stock that is down on earnings is usually not worth trading for 4 to 8 weeks, so I take it off the daily scanner and put it in rehab, e.g. Zoom (ZM) is one such ticker recently moved form the daily trader to the rehab/short candidate list. I am currently short ZM. I do pretty well, trading both the underlying and options (straight vanilla mostly long calls but sometimes long puts). Scanz is a big part of my ability to catch plays when it is most advantageous to do so. But whichever scanner you choose, you will want to make sure you can point it to scan a watchlist of your own making. It is work in the beginning but once you get your initial watchlist and define your bread and butter scans, it is so easy even a caveman can do it.
Www.trade-ideas.com IB and tos have built in scanners. https://trade-alert.com/wt/stories/@ALL Option blocks alerts.
Thank you - Scanz seems like a good product for sure. Do you mind sharing a couple of the details of filters that you use to catch trades before they blow up too high beyond profit potential? Do you day trade or swing?
What sort of breakouts? Channel breakouts? Consolidation breakouts? Opening range breakouts? etc. go to https://www.trade-ideas.com/Help.html and ctrl+f "breakout" you can build whatever scan criteria and filters you want. For options check out blackboxstocks and flowalgo.
What about tc 2000 or tradingview? They have also scanners included but are cheaper. Ok you don´t get L2.
I day trade and swing trade, with the primary difference being the ticker's context and what happens the day I enter. You can see some of my rencent swings in my journal here at ET: https://www.elitetrader.com/et/thre...inancial-publication-on-the-interwebs.352754/ I'll show some of my scans there in the coming days.
This would be great because i just try scanz out. Does scanz has a log function. I would like to get back in time to look if my creteria matched to a specific time. Trade Ideas has such a function. Otherwise you must run the scans all the time to see if a stock shows up.