Thursday, January 11, 2007

Breakouts

Once again an idea woke me up and nothing would do except I jump out of bed all bright eyed and - well maybe not that enthusiastically - but at least I got up to pursue the dream. I don't know who said it first, it's been said so many times, but 98% of success is just showing up.

Anyway I've been talking about breakouts for about a week now and I finally figured out how to write the formula that permits me to filter for breakouts from an ascending triangle. Actually it was in the filtering software already and I just remembered that I had read about it in their help documentation some months ago. Regardless how we got there the filter produced some interesting results.

Of 74 completed trades in 77 days the win percentage was 68% which is not too shabby and fits in with some of my all time great producers. Actually I throw out any filter that produces less than 60%. Maybe some of those others had a better ROI but I think you can lose your capital and your will to live with too many losers in a row. So I try to stay on the right side of 2/3rds in this area. The ROI was 97% annualized (based on 100K starting capital). Also there was no price bias the filter is just as likely to produce winners at 15 dollars as 35 dollars. Net change over time tells the true story.

NET Change 1 day - .11%
4 days - 1.18
10 days - 2.22
20 days - 2.89
30 days - 4.71

Obviously this is not a short term filter. I'll give you the 5 top selections (of 11) of this filter from yesterday's close. These are in highest volume to lower volume order. Remember, as normal back testing results are based on the top stock in the pile as a function of volume. So if yesterday were in a back test only AMAT would have qualified.

AMAT
SCHW
NWSA
CA
CBG

Do your own DD. While I have no position in any of them at this time I might take a interest in any one or more of these stocks today.

I use stockfetcher.com for my filtering. It is an excellent company with a rapid response to any help request you might send their way. I get nothing from the endorsement - I just use it and like it.

1 comment:

QUALITY STOCKS UNDER 5 DOLLARS said...

Nice post on breakouts.