Look at tickers in the Utilities sector. They tend to have fairly predictable cash flows. Electric, water, gas companies, etc. Their demand and revenue streams are consistent and well-understood. They tend to have monopolies that are under the thumb of regulators. Even though they’re the only game in town, they can’t crank prices or they’ll get slapped down by The Man. They also are basically obligated to keep providing service. There’s stories out there of gas companies shutting off service for unpaid bills in winter and freezing some poor senior to death that couldn’t get to the bank.
I generally hold stocks to just save my money! In your case, I hold UnitedHealth (UNH). That can be helpful in my case and well generally, the healthcare stocks tend to be less sensitive to market movements.
Lookup percent ADR formula that Qullamaggie uses. Above 4 are the more active/higher daily ranging stocks. As far as directionality, stocks continuously going up have the last close >10 and 10>20>50>200 emas aligned with brief pullbacks/consolidations to the 10 or 20 separating legs of the trend. QM just started streaming on Twitch again. You can catch his summaries on YouTube so you don't have to sit through a stream session waiting for the good parts. No better amateur stock swing trader than him (who freely shows what he does). One of QM's initial mentors is Pradeep Bonde. You can also find him on YouTube but, imo, he's more short term swing trading. If you want slow trending stocks then the pct ADR is going to be 1-3. As QM has mentioned recently, the stocks having recent episodic pivots (i.e., gapping up on positive fundamental news and continuing up) are doing very well right now. I would recommend TC200 if you're serious about regular scanning. If QM and Pradeep rely on it so much, safe bet it's the best they could find. TradingView is good if you want more historical data to look at. I use TC2000 and Amibroker with Tiingo data for scanning. [Looking for aligned emas is just common sense. For example, if 10<20, pct ADR>4, last close >20 and 20>50>100, you have a candidate for another leg up. You can start playing with price and avg 14 or 20 day volume to pick small, mid and large cap stocks. You can start your list off by looking for stocks higher by a chosen pct in the last month or two.]
You won't be satisfied by buyandhold any stocks if you want to have clean moves. You need to create your own strategy on them, that is the only way.