Stocks Down for the Day: A Great Pattern for Your Scanner

Stocks Down for the Day: A Great Pattern for Your Scanner

Feb 1, 2010

A very common question we get is,

“How do i find stocks that are down for the day? I only see ‘up’ filters.”




A new video shows how to find stocks that are up or down for the day, using our “up from the close” filters. Thank you Marissa for explaining that so clearly.

A related question is,

“Why don’t you add a down for the day filter?”

The short answer is that you only have one column in your market view showing this information. You wouldn’t create an up for the day column and a separate down for the day column. That would be a waste of space on the market view, and it would be a waste of space on our config window. The video shows the relationship between the filters and the fields in the market view. It’s all the same data!

Another question in this theme is

“Wouldn’t it be easier to have a down for the day filter?”

I admit that I used to have these same thoughts. Sometimes negative numbers are confusing. But once I started to work through some examples, I realized the power of negative numbers. I would not want to type in something like:

Show me stocks where: The price was up from the previous close.
 Also show me stocks where: The price was flat from the previous close.
 Also show me stocks where: The price was down no more than 0.5% from the previous close.
 Also show me stocks where: The price was down at least 1.5% from the previous close.

It is much more concise to enter just two values into the filter. https://trade-ideas.54solutions.com/MinMaxNegative/?min=-0.5&max=-1.5&filter_name=FCP

I started from the video. The market as a whole was down about 1%. I’m looking for stocks that did not move the same was as the rest of the market. But then I started making some changes. What if the market is down by only 1/4%? Or up by 1/4%? By expressing these values only as numbers, it was easy to move the range around as I needed it. And by using the our new filter visualization tool, I could really see what was going on.

Good luck modeling? Call us or contact us with any questions or help you need building your patterns.