So I’m a big fan of Mark Minervini and am a student of his work.
I’ve read his books multiple times. And even summarize them every now and then for myself to dive really deep into the content.
I follow his trading principles myself by using the information he is giving away in his books. Also I’ve set up a separate column within Tweetdeck to follow his tweets instantly.
Whenever he tweets a ticker and some sort of note how and where he traded it I’m recording it. I pull up a chart with the stock and very often directly see the buy point he has taken.
I use that information to improve my own trading. And try to further improve my stock scanning to be able to find the great trades he does.
It happens more often lately that I’m watching or already trading the same stocks Mark Minervini is. What gives me some confirmation that I’m on the right track.
In Mark’s first book; Trade Like A Stock Market Wizard he has published his Trend Template.
He uses that to filter out stocks using some technical criteria before doing an additional research on them.
Personally I use Think or Swim for a lot of charting and scanning. So I’ve been working on getting his Trend Template setup in the Scanner of Think or Swim.
Besides his criteria I’ve added a minimum stock price and trading volume to filter out some weeds I’m not interested in myself.
So instead of having you do all the work yourself as well I’m sharing the filters that I created in the ThinkScript editor so you can easily copy them to your machine.
1. The current stock price is above both the 150-day and 200-day moving average
close(“period” = AggregationPeriod.DAY) is greater than SimpleMovingAvg(“length” = 150).”SMA”
and
close(“period” = AggregationPeriod.DAY) is greater than SimpleMovingAvg(“length” = 200).”SMA”
2. The 150-day moving average is above the 200-day moving average
SimpleMovingAvg(“length” = 150).”SMA” is greater than SimpleMovingAvg(“length” = 200).”SMA”
3. The 200-day moving average line is trending up for at least 1 month
Working on improving this one.
4. The 50-day moving average is above both the 150-day and 200-day moving averages
SimpleMovingAvg(“length” = 50).”SMA” is greater than SimpleMovingAvg(“length” = 150).”SMA”
and
SimpleMovingAvg(“length” = 50).”SMA” is greater than SimpleMovingAvg(“length” = 200).”SMA”
5. The current stock price is trading above the 50-day moving average
close(“period” = AggregationPeriod.DAY) is greater than SimpleMovingAvg(“length” = 50).”SMA”
6. The current stock price is at least 30% above it’s 52-week low
close(“period” = AggregationPeriod.DAY) /
Lowest(“data” = CLOSE, “length” = 250)
is greater than 1.3
7. The current stock price is within at least 25% of its 52-week high
close(“period” = AggregationPeriod.DAY) /
Highest(“data” = close, “length” = 250) > 0.75
8. The relative strength ranking (as reported in Investor’s Business Daily) is no less than 70. Preferably in the 80s or 90s.
It is not possible to use Investor’s Business Daily ranking within Think or Swim. But I’m currently working on ways to find a similar relative strength ranking within Think or Swim to use.