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How to make a scan/alert to pull all stocks over 50% of ATR

StockspotifyStockspotify ✭
in Scanning
How would I make a scan to show me all US stocks trading a certain % above or below the ATR?
Will I be able to do it by %, say ATR is $5.00 and i want to see all names trading positive and negative $7.50, I would like to have one that shows all names above 50% ATR and one for 100%

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    markdmarkd mod
    Answer ✓
    The "14" is a parameter - a parameter is a number you feed into a function.

    A function is code you can't see that does a calculation (you don't need to see the code but you should understand what the function is supposed to do - for that, you read the documentation in the Technical Indicators section in Chart School. It's the best free education available).

    You know something is a function if it has a set of brackets after it, usually filled with numbers, like ATR(14), or MACD(12,26,9).

    For ATR(14 ), 14 is the lookback period - in other words, the number of bars over which you want to average the range. You can use any reasonable number, but 14 is the default. The default is the number recommended by the person (or people) who wrote the code (or who came up with the idea for the code they asked the programmers to write) and tested it with lots of different parameters to see what worked best (in their opinion). So, ATR(14) looks at the past 14 bars, calculates the range for each bar and comes up with an average.

    If you are completely new to this (and it sounds like you are), I would recommend you spend maybe a weekend going over some of the Chart School material on scanning (and indicators) to get you started.

    This is a good place to start, but look around on your own in Chart School, too:

    https://support.stockcharts.com/doku.php?id=scans:tutorials

Answers

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    markdmarkd mod
    ATR is always a positive number - it describes the average range between a stock's high and low over some period of time. ATR is not a price, so I'm not sure what you mean by "positive and negative $7.50".

    For stocks trading in a range wider than 100% of ATR:

    and [range > ATR(14)] // or whatever parameter you want.

    For wider than 50% of ATR

    and [range > ATR(14) * .5]

    I'm not sure that's what you really want. If not, ask again.

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    StockspotifyStockspotify ✭
    Yes, thats exactly what I wanted. Question tho, what does the 14 represent? Does that mean show me all trading at 1.4 times the atr? I assume not because your next example shows a .5....Im new to the language of the programming here fwiw. Ideally I would like to see names trading at or above 1.5 times the average true range and another that will show 2x atr,, what would those inputs look like?
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    StockspotifyStockspotify ✭
    MarkD
    Thank you so much for the reply, your answer should shorten my learning curve by a huge magnitude.
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