percent change on AccDist

dan_malden

Hi,
I am running a simple scan that return 0 results, but I don't understand why:

//////////
[type is stock]
and [country is US]
and [PctChange(100,AccDist) > 10]
////////////

So I am looking for a change in AccDist of 10% over the last 100 days.

When I remove "[country is US]" I get more than 600 results.

Is it a bug?

Thanks,
Dan

markd

When I run it, I get 999 results.

Substituting [group is sp500] for the first two lines gets 52 results (but I didn't check to see if they were valid results; they usually are though).

If you got 0 results, the problem is probably not with the scan engine. It might be a connectivity issue - i.e., what you send is not what the scan engine gets. I don't know how that might happen. It could be a problem at Stockcharts processing traffic, or it might be an ISP problem (yours or Stockcharts or someone in between).

In any case, if I'm getting 999 results when it works, then "country is US" is too large a universe. You could narrow it down by some other characteristic(s) you consider tradable, e.g. average volume, capitalization, price, yield, SCTR range, etc.

lmkwin

The Accumulation Distribution is a tough one to use as a stand alone indicator.

https://school.stockcharts.com/doku.php?id=technical_indicators:accumulation_distribution_line

Scroll down to the "Disconnect with Prices" section.

You may note that there is no right hand scale displayed on the chart as the numbers can be quite extreme. OBV has a similar display scale. Note that by changing your scan from 10% to 100% does a little in knocking down the results. Changing to 200% knocks a few more out.

The indicator is based on the CMF, so maybe try looking at that. It's got it's "quirks" as well though. If you are going to use them, they are best used in conjunction with other indicators in your scan, in my opinion.

https://school.stockcharts.com/doku.php?id=technical_indicators:chaikin_money_flow_cmf

markd

Another potential problem is the PctChange function may not be written to cope with negative numbers. You never have a negative number in a stock price, but you do with many indicators.