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For months I've been wanting to get back to swinging stocks on the side. So now I am getting serious about it again, and have funded an MB Trading equities account just for this purpose. Still sticking with futures as my primary goal, but swinging stocks holds a special place in my heart as I've been doing it for almost 15 years.
Most recently, up until about two or three years ago, I was using Worden StockFinder to screen. But now I am looking for something a bit simpler, and less time consuming. So I've been looking for some good screeners.
Take note of all the signals and patterns it detects, it seems to be exactly what I am looking for. Has anyone used it? Or does anyone have any better recommendations?
I've used Vector Vest. They were good but not as good as the the Stock Screener on Morningstar and Vector Vest was more expensive. Morningstar subscription to their entire site is like $18 a month. But Morningstar may not be suited for short term trading. They provide a lot more fundamental information and a lot of background research which is more suited to investing versus trading.
I've known swing traders that used Vector Vest. But I never felt it was designed for short term trading either.
I'm just a simple man trading a simple plan.
My daddy always said, "Every day above ground is a good day!"
I think swing trading with options is even better: as the trade goes against you, delta helps limit your losses, while if you get a runner, delta approaches ~1.0 and you get some juicy leverage in your favor. Of course, you're having to deal with theta decay but if you buy 30-45 days from expiration you shouldn't have too much to worry about as price will get you out of the trade pretty soon if it's not going to be a winner.
I use Trade-ideas, almost limitless possibilities with a very good support team on the forum (no NT type attitude)
You can use it for free as well with data delayed by 20mins i think. So if you don't need to action a strategy within 20mins you can pretty much take advantage of all the functionalities eg: consolidation, short covering etc.
The new beta is also quite innovative (bit like radarscreen i think)
Ameritrades StrategyDesk has a pretty good screener. StrategyDesk has one big limitation and that is the number of stocks you can monitor in real time. The limit is 2,000. I focus my screens on the S&P500 so it's no problem for me.
You specifically mentioned simplicity. The code involved in creating custom screens is really easy to learn especially for you since you have such a strong programming background. You'll find it a piece of cake.
Some advantages are as follows:
1. ability to pull together a relatively simple screen quickly from built in indicators
2. ability to create slightly more complex screens by incorporating custom indicators and conditions that you create/code yourself using StrategyDesks simple formulas
3. the screen can incorporate multiple time frames. i.e. you can specify conditions from all chart timeframes as needed
4. it's reasonably fast provided you don't have an overly complex set of conditions on 2,000 stocks. These calculation are operating on your machine, not like Trade Ideas which operates on remote servers so the efficiency of the screener will be effected by your internet connection and the capabilities of your computer.
5. you can add as many data columns as you like - quote info, built in or custom indicator info all of which can be sorted by any column.
6. columns can be formated dynamically according to coded conditions. See my pics of the color column wizard and the screener settings window.
Disadvantages:
1. May give delayed signals if screens are designed in an overly complex way on thousands of stocks operating on a very short time period such as less than 5 minutes. In other words, if you have 10 or more conditions which incorporate indicators that require a lot of lookback data on several different time frames many of which are looking at 1 or 2 minute bars all over 2,000 stocks then you can expect to receive some delayed signals.
