Scanning for a candle stick that's had a larger drop than the last 5 trading days

tempestlight

Hi there,

Is there a way to create a scan that finds a large single day drop and looks like a significantly steeper drop than other daily candles over the last 5 trading days? I would also be interested in checking to see if the volume is above average on that day too. I've screenshoted a picture of an example. Thanks!

markd

Whenever you want to write a more complex scan, you need to describe the pattern you see to the scan engine in terms the scan engine can understand. The scan engine understands indicators, overlays, bar values and (not relevant here) symbol properties (like sector, market cap, etc.), so you need to tell the scan engine what those indicators, overlays and values are, and what they are doing.

So, the indicators and overlays on your chart are the place to start. You may not need them all. On the other hand, there may be some indicator or overlay you need that is not on the chart.

You could first try to describe to yourself what each indicator and overlay is doing or where it is - rising, falling, above, below, getting closer, moving apart - and then think about the scan engine operators you can use to describe that - rising would be a current value greater than a previous value, below would be less than something, moving apart would be some difference in the past is less than a difference today (e.g. upper and lower channels), etc.

In this case, these are probably the key characteristics you would want to the scan engine to capture:

the short term MA, maybe 5 or 10, should be falling (i.e. less than x days ago)

the current close should be less than the short term MA

the range of the current bar should be greater than some multiple of some ATR - e.g. ATR(10) * 1.5 (this is an example of an indicator useful for scanning that may not be on the chart)

the low of the current bar should be the lowest of the past five, i.e. min(5, close)

Then finally you want volume greater than some sma of volume, maybe 20 (a month).

tempestlight

Thank you! I will fiddle around with my code with these parameters and see what I can come up with:)