I don't normally trade equities, so this may be a somewhat basic question. Please bear with me ;-) Over the last few weeks I've followed the soap opera that is SCOX (disclosure: I'm short) and a thought struck me: At any given time there must be at least a few dozen companies on Nasdaq alone that are doing similar things - for instance conduct nuisance litigation, overreach themselves, fight with outside investors, etc. Screening a stock universe for numeric criteria is easy enough. What I'd like to do, in a quick and easy way, is to screen stocks for, well, for want of a better word, clear and present boardroom lunacy. That would be a free text search, not something numeric, possibly involving some human interaction or judgement. Are there any resources on the web with which to do that ? Doesn't have to be Nasdaq alone, European or Asian stocks would interest me, too.
You could go about it in a roundabout way: Scan for very high volume moves that ocurred w/in the last few days. Use 3-5 times the 50 day avg vol as your filter. These are usually the result of some kind of shock event, so you could then research the company to find out what happened. There will of course usually be some kind of intial reaction the other way or sideways consolidation resulting from the overbought/oversold condition. If you felt that the news warranted a continuation in the direction of the shock move and that it wasn't just a shakeout or a squeeze, then that intial countermove may be a good place to take a position. Harold