Guppy Multiple Moving Average (GMMA) Scans

daddybyday

Hello, All,

I am brand new to StockCharts.com, and have been having fun with the scan tool. I love the charting tools!

I'm a big fan of the Guppy Multiple Moving Average (GMMA). For those who aren't familiar with it, it is a collection of 2 6-EMA ribbons, one shorter term and one longer term. The ribbons themselves and the the interaction between them gives a great deal of information about a stocks current trend.

I'm looking for a scans that deal with the GMMA, or at least with MA ribbons in general. For example, maybe a scan for stocks for which the stort-term ribbon has crossed above or below the longer term ribbon, or for stocks for which the EMA's within the ribbon are converging or diverging, or crossing over one another within the ribbon.

Has anyone worked with or found any scans for EMA ribbons, or for the GMMA specifically? If not, can anyone give me some hints about the direction to go in order to create some?

I would appreciate any ideas or suggestions you may be able to offer.

Thanks!

Tom

markd

As far as I know, there are no built-in scans for GMMA. So you would have to build them yourself. You would need to take a little time to learn the scan engine syntax. Refer to the Support page options for scanning, including the videos. A bit of programming experience helps, but its not necessary. The main thing to know as background is, the scan engine usually expects things to be spelled a certain way exactly, including brackets, parentheses, commas and so on, and often the order of things makes a difference.

As for GMMA scans, it seems you could do at least three types.

One would be to test for convergence of the emas, indicating a trend may be dying. For that, I think you would test for the distance between the outer emas at two points in time, the most recent difference being less than the first, so maybe 10 or 20 units (days, weeks) ago longer ema minus 10 units ago shorter ema greater than currentlonger ema minus current shorter ema.

The second would be to test for expansion of the emas for a trend starting up or continuing. This would be just the opposite of convergence - the more distant in time emas are closer together (the difference is less) than the most recent emas.

The third would be crossovers. Here you would have to choose which ema crossovers represent a change of trend and test for the crossover. So in general it would be shorter ema x longer ema for a bull turn ("x" means crosses above), and longer ema x shorter ema for a bear turn (you think of it as short ema crossing below, but you have to express it as long ema crossing above, which is essentially the same thing).

daddybyday

Thank you for your comment, Mark.

Here is my first attempt:

[type = stock] AND [Daily SMA(20,Daily Volume) > 40000]
and [SCTR >75]

and [today's ema(3,close) > today's ema(5,close)] and [today's ema(5,close) > today's ema(8,close)] and [today's ema(8,close) > today's ema(10,close)] and [today's ema(10,close) > today's ema(12,close)] and [today's ema(12,close) > today's ema(15,close)] and [today's ema(15,close) > today's ema(30,close)] and [today's ema(15,close) > today's ema(35,close)] and [today's ema(15,close) > today's ema(40,close)] and [today's ema(15,close) > today's ema(45,close)] and [today's ema(15,close) > today's ema(50,close)] and [today's ema(15,close) > today's ema(60,close)]

First, I want positions with an SCTR > 75.

Then, I want positions where the short-term ribbon is all aligned, so I just had the shortest greater than the next longest, that one greater than the next longest, etc., to the longest of the short term ribbon. That will assure that the short-term ribbon is indicating a short-term uptrend (possibly).

Then, I want the short-term band to be above the long-term band. I'm not requiring at this time that the long-term band be lined up in order (I may do that one next). Right now I don't want to weed out recent crossovers where the long-term band is still sorting itself out. So, since I've selected in the the first step to insure that the 15 EMA (the longest-term in the short band) is the lowest of that band, I just needed to be sure that the EMA 15 is above all of the individual EMA's making up the long-term band. Not a very elegant solution, but I think it will work. I know that the syntax is all correct, but haven't run the scan yet.

Depending on what this one yields, I may edit it to make sure that the EMAs are all in line from lowest to highest--insuring that the short-term band and the long-term band are all lined up from lowest to highest.

This is my first attempt. It's a brute-force approach, and not very elegant. I'd appreciate comments from anyone who has used the GMMA, or scanned for GMMA events. Feel free to try the scan above, and make any suggestions you may have.

Thanks!
Tom

daddybyday

OK, I've checked out the scan, and I like that it did exactly what I'd like it to do! But it returned about 900 positions, which is more than I have time to look at. So I've added a couple more filters to it. First, I filtered for only US positions (not to dis the rest of the world, but I feel more comfortable with that), and then I filtered for positions whose most recent close was between $10 and $50. This still returned about 350 candidates, but I'm pretty happy with it.

Now I think I'm going to look for a way to try to get it closer to the breakout, as this scan doesn't differentiate for positions that just crossed over and positions that crossed over a year ago. I think I'm on the right track though. I'll keep playing with it. Here's my latest scan with the filters. As I said, I'd love comments from those who've worked with the GMMA.

[type = stock] AND [Daily SMA(20,Daily Volume) > 40000]
and [SCTR >75]

and [today's ema(3,close) > today's ema(5,close)] and [today's ema(5,close) > today's ema(8,close)] and [today's ema(8,close) > today's ema(10,close)] and [today's ema(10,close) > today's ema(12,close)] and [today's ema(12,close) > today's ema(15,close)] and [today's ema(15,close) > today's ema(30,close)] and [today's ema(15,close) > today's ema(35,close)] and [today's ema(15,close) > today's ema(40,close)] and [today's ema(15,close) > today's ema(45,close)] and [today's ema(15,close) > today's ema(50,close)] and [today's ema(15,close) > today's ema(60,close)]
and [country is US]

and [Close > 10.00]
and [Close < 50.00]

Thanks
Tom

markd

Sounds like you are having fun and know what you are doing. Not a GMMA user, so I'll bow out. Good luck with it!

daddybyday

Thank you, Mark.