Yes @croc49 I think this is a good topic to discuss. After not trading for about 10 years I decided to get back in to it in October last year when I started to read about the opportunities in the battery minerals, block-chain, and cannabis markets. I developed a very rudimentary stock exploration/search system and set up a paper portfolio using $100k that returned 20% in a few days. So I plunged back in with real money and sure enough made a good return. But then things changed and the task of selecting spec stocks to trade became a lot harder. At first I thought that it was just a general market (XJO) thing and that all I had to do was to wait for the market to trend up again and my fortunes would change for the better. But I was wrong, and I came to the conclusion that spec stocks and probably spec stocks within sectors have their own individual momentum cycles that are not necessarily directly associated with the general market. I’m pretty sure there isn’t an industry accepted index that tracks these cycles and I’m not convinced that it would be worth the effort to develop a quantitative system that could track them. Personally I think that a technical system that can be used to search for spec stocks that are in trend, or spec stocks that are forming a base and potentially getting ready to move back into uptrend, will if used with discipline move you into the right spec stock sectors/markets as they start to move again. I know now that trading spec stocks that have had a good run and are moving back down in a retrace or significant trend correction move isn’t a wise thing to do. I am still interested in a more general way of tracking the momentum of the spec stock sectors and would be more than interested in hearing how others do this.
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