Quill,
We’re ITM. I found a scanner that’s affordable, easy to use, and is also a superb back-tester.
First, some backstory. I tried --once again-- to force Schwab’s stock scanner to provide a list of stocks that were ‘at the gate’. Predictably, I failed yet again, because its tools are so crude and uncustomizable. I also know that E*Trade’s, TD’s, and FinViz’s scanners are no better. However, a program called StockAnalyze (SA) --which I’ve used for several years now-- can be forced to produce a list of stocks whose signals are timely, especially once they’re been filtered through Simon. Here’s some examples: ZLAB, XENE, WCN, WVE, VS, TAC, and there’s probably 30 more. But that’s enough to make my point.
Here’s what I did. I asked Schwab’s scanner to show me all ADRs traded on the three major exchanges with an avg 10-day vol > 50k. I exported the list as a *csv file and imported it into SA, directing it to produce a list of any stocks that had ‘buy’ signals in the past two days. SA rejected a half dozen tickers for not being able to pull data from Yahoo for them, and I threw a basket of 30 trading systems at the 537 items remaining in the list. The processing took about 3 minutes. Then I bubbled yesterday’s signals to the top of the list and charted them at BC with HA Smoothie.
Scanning for ‘at the gaters’ is a multi-step process, but not tedious or time-consuming. The program is $50 for the lifetime version. Its power is comparable to MetaStock and far easier to use than AmiBroker. The programmer, Sasha, is superb about support.
Arindam