What do you scan for?

I use ExcelPriceFeed which brings back the opening price, closing price, high and low for every stock I enter into Excel. Then I use proprietary price action analysis to choose stocks.

 

I look at value. P/e p/b div yield etc.
In other words:
Is this a fundamentally sound business that is attractively priced.
But I'm less of a "trader" than an investor.

 

I'm very interested if you back-tested this and, if so, what data source(s) you used for the historical fundamental data (hopefully without selection bias)??

 

you are 50% there. at least you know where these scanning website are located. But the criteria you pick is the "secret sauce." Either you get trained by someone or you develop your own for the criteria you use for your scanning.

 

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Exactly\ i scan for moves in my trading notebook;
+volume ETFs. Sometimes semi liquid stuff ; sometimes SPY, but i seldom trade that benchmark.
Murray T turtle........................................
I also scan my paper printed candle charts\200dma

 

The smart way to play stocks

 

I used to get historical fundamental "Key Ratios" data from Morningstar (free) like
https://financials.morningstar.com/ratios/r.html?t=0P0000031C&culture=en&platform=sal
and then used genetic programming to form rules based on the data for trades to last a few weeks to a few months.

Morningstar changed their web pages and made it harder to have scripts scrape the data given a list of symbols. So I stopped that approach.

 

Thanks for all the great responses, this is a very helpful group

 

This is a very good question for which I have a poor answer.
My selection criteria are based around Graham and my own personal observations without real quantitative back testing.

I really should set some time aside for this.

For what it's worth, much of what drove me to more direct involvement in investing has been watching things like the dot com boom and the real estate crash. In both cases I could see what was going on and say "this is a bubble". I spend a fair amount of time asking myself, "what is going on that doesn't make sense?"

 

Gaps and expanding range breakouts .... extreme charts, outliers where I have an edge..

eg for swings I like SQQQ SARK SCO UVXY here