share your tips on day trading..., page-62

Johno,

Can only speak for myself, I run price/vol scans, pullback scans daily, it becomes obvious from the price/vol what was hot for the day.

The stocks that are in the majority of the big movers give you an indication of any sector strength for the day. Assessing whether that is the beginning of a longer term trend is a bit more difficult. Like the bios this week may not follow on like csg stocks did a while back, and maybe the U stocks may not be able to carry on.

I look at the broader picture and put the technicals/scans in the context of economics, global sentiment, news, dow, oil price, gold, base metal price movts etc. For example the U price moved up a bit early in the week and there was talk about the nuclear power plants needed in China, as well as some U conference somewhere. So I had my U stocks on a watchlist and checked out the likely prospects, particularly any vol movt on my nightly chart scans. But I was completely unprep'd for the bios, just didn't believe the movt when I saw it on the charts (can be volatile, dangerous, tricky beasts).

I do my scans each night, but then review them in the morning on the basis of what has happened overnight. If gold price is up will look at what could be tradeable in the gold sector and so on.

Daily/Weekend papers, AFR news stories will also add a few clues to what could be next hot thing, or whether the current sector strength could continue. Talk about things like increases in the price of manganese or phosphate can trigger interest in sectors.

So I don't have any simple method, or magic scan. But you do need to have watchlists of stocks (tradeable, your favs) in their different sectors. Eyeballing these constantly is a good way of detecting any early activity that might lead to movt in the whole sector. Some people have one lead stock from a sector eg NCM for the gold sector to help them track sector strength.