You hear often that most individual stocks tend to move with the market. Some people claim it makes it harder to find an edge when trading stocks. I'm not trying to agree or disagree with that point, but I decided to take google screener for a spin and see how true this is. For those of you who are unfamiliar with beta, it is simply describes how much a stock will act like compared to the market as a whole. For example, if a the market(maybe the S&P 500 index) moves up 1% in a day and the stock follows at 1% it would have a Beta of 1, had the same stocked moved down -1% it would be -1. Beta essentially describes correlation between a stock and the market and helps define potential risk. I asked myself: 1.) what percentage of stocks (total) move with the market(a positive beta) and 2.) what percentage of stocks (total) move nearly hand-in-hand with the market (which I defined as being a beta of .8 to 1.2). I asked the same question for what I call more liquid stocks. I defined those as stocks which are small caps or bigger and have a volume of at least 100,000. I'm not sure if google uses average volume and if so what average, but again this was just a quick look. Stocks (Total) that move with the market (positive beta): ~24% Stocks (Total) that move hand-in-hand (beta .8 to 1.2) ~5% Stocks (Liquid) that move with the market (positive beta): ~75% Stocks (Liquid) that move hand-in-hand with the market(beta .8 to 1.2): ~20% As you can see as you move to more liquid stocks the stocks tend to behave more like the market, in the "general" direction. Merely an observation and a very quick look, but I found it interesting.