Editor,
Thanks for Markos Katsanos's article ["Las Vegas Or Los Nasdaq?"] in the January 2005 S&C magazine. I have found the article to be useful in my trading. Does Katsanos have a search formula for MetaStock to find stocks that meet the trading requirements?

Christine Martin
via email

Markos Katsanos replies:
You can use exactly the same formula I used for testing. You could also add the following conditions: C<10 (to limit the search to low price stocks) and mov(V,50,S)>50000. (This condition will eliminate illiquid stocks.)

Because of supply and demand dynamics, the system works better with low float stocks (less than about 60 million shares outstanding), so you might also want to manually eliminate high-float or high-cap stocks.

In addition, when exploring Nasdaq stocks, you could add the following line to eliminate the possibility of a stock getting a Nasdaq delisting notice or declaring a reverse split:

MOV(C,21,S)>1

     Keep in mind that there will be few breakouts in bear markets, so use
     it to explore only when the market is going up (that is, when the S&P 
     600 is above its 50-day average and its 20-day average is pointing up).
     
     For your convenience, here is the full formula. Just copy and paste it 
     into the MetaStock explorer.

MACDH:=MACD()-Mov(MACD(),9,E);
SDC:=Stdev(C ,30)/Mov(C,30,S);
PERIOD:=14; 
COEF:=.1;
INTRA:=Log(H)-Log(L); 
VINTRA:=Stdev(INTRA,PERIOD);
INTER:=Log(Typical())-Log(Ref(Typical(),-1)); 
VINTER:=Stdev(INTER,PERIOD);
CUTOFF:=COEF*(VINTER+VINTRA)*C;
MF:=C-(H+L)/2+Typical()-Ref(Typical(),-1);
FVE:=Sum(If(MF>CUTOFF, +V,If(MF<-CUTOFF,-V,0)),PERIOD)
     /Mov(V,PERIOD,S)/PERIOD*100;
{Buy Conditions}
FVE>-1 AND LinRegSlope(C,35)/Ref(C,-35)*100>-.35
AND LinRegSlope(C,35)/Ref(C,-35)*100<.4
AND LinRegSlope(C,70)/Ref(C,-70)*100>-.4º
AND LinRegSlope(C,70)/Ref(C,-70)*100<.4
AND LinRegSlope(C,170)/Ref(C,-170)*100>-.2
AND MACDH>-.003ºº
AND (Sum(SDC-LLV(SDC,150),3)/Sum(HHV(SDC,150) -LLV(SDC,150),3))*100<20 
AND C>Mov(C,10,E)
AND SDC*ADX(25)<1.3 
AND Stoch(10,3)>30 
AND C<10 
AND MOV(V,50,S)>50000