Stock Trading: How to Scan the Stock Market for Your Trading Setups (Quickly and Efficiently)

00:00 In today's episode, I have a question from Umang, who asked, "Hey Rayner, how do I scan the stock markets for my trading setup? Because there are so many stocks out there. Hundreds, if not thousands of stocks."
00:17 So my response to this is that there's a four-step procedure that you can follow, number one: finding a trading setup or a pattern is just like finding a wife.
00:37 if you are looking for a wife who is a brunette, Asian, Chinese, Indian, or whatsoever, you have to know what you're looking for in the first place, and it's the same for trading the markets.
00:54 Are you looking for a trending stock? a breakout stock, or maybe a stock that's tanked over the last twelve months and you're going to buy near the bottom whatsoever.
01:10 Once you've defined your trading setup then you can go into step two: Determine the market cap of the stocks you want to trade. For example, for those of you who are in the U.S., you have Russell 3000. Russell 3000 comprises of the large-cap, mid-cap, and the small-cap stocks. So, if you can define what market capitalization of stocks you want to trade, you can filter it down further. But if you're let's say, in Singapore, there's the large-cap, mid-cap, you have a few thereabout. You don't really need to do this classification, it's only for those of you who are in countries where you have thousands and thousands of stocks.
01:48 So once you have classified the market cap at step two, proceed to step three: Scan the markets. Let's say you want to scan stocks that are trending, what you want to do is to put up the twenty, fifty and two hundred period moving average, so if the stock is above the three moving averages, chances are it's a trending stock. You can also go through your entire watchlist and scan all the stocks which are above these moving averages. Alternatively, if you want to trade breakout stocks, you can just look for stocks that are on a 52-week high, breaking out of their 200-day high, etc. Another example I can give you is that if you want to buy stocks that are doing very bad over the last 12 months and you want to catch bottoms, what you can do is to scan stocks at their 52-week low, 200-day low, and etc.
02:44 Once you've scanned the markets, what you want to do is do number four: Put it all in a spreadsheet. Let's say you have 500 stocks to scan, you can do it all on the weekend. You want to put down those stocks in a spreadsheet that are close to having their setup occur so that when the market opens next week, you will only focus on those stocks in your spreadsheet that are about to have their setup occur. So, what you want to do is to find the gems among your 500 stocks and put it into a spreadsheet, and focus on it this coming week.
03:40 Now that you can scan the stock market and find the trading setups that you want, some of you might be wondering if there is any software to do this work for you? The only one that I do know of is Finviz, F-I-N-V-I-Z, and that is only for the U.S. stock market. They have this kind of quick scanner on whether you want to use fundamentals or technicals. As for local Singaporean stocks, Philippine stocks, Indian stocks, I do not know of such tools that are in the market right now. But for the U.S. there is Finviz. If there are no scanners you can just go through the four steps I shared with you. Number one, define your trading setup. Number two, know the market cap that you want to trade. Number three, scan the markets. And number four, put those stocks that you have scanned into a spreadsheet so you can track them when the market opens this coming week.
04:35 So that's all I have for you in this week's episode of Ask Rayner. If you're looking for proven trading strategies that work, you can go down to my website tradingwithrayner.com and access my materials for free. If you have any questions, let me know in the comments section below, and if you have enjoyed this video, hit the Like button and I would really appreciate it. I'll talk to you soon.
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