Easily Scan for Trending Stocks

Many Stock Screeners (including the one on SGXcafe previously) only allows you to screen for stocks based on the current value of metrics. However, we are sometimes more interested in the trend of the metric than its current value. Hence, I have recently added more than 50 metrics trends to SGXcafe. At the moment, you are able to use them in two main places.

1) In Screener
You can now use SGXcafe screener to easily scan for stocks that are trending in the desired direction for your favorite metrics.

One question that you might have is how the “trends” are computed. It is essentially fitting a straight line to the data and the trend is the slope, or m, of y = mx + c. I hope you still remember the equation for a straight line from secondary school 😉

For the more mathematically inclined: Data points (i.e. y = metric value and x = number of days since first data point) are first transformed via standardization (i.e. mean 0 and standard deviation 1). Linear regression is then run on those data points (using least-squared estimate), and finally the trend score is simply equal to the slope of the best fitted line.

2) In Stock Profile
Also, for each stock, you can now go to the profile page and see its short and long term trends for various metrics (e.g. Capitaland Profile).

You can will see Up, Down, Flat, and -.
Up would mean that there is an uptrend for that metric in that period.
Down would mean that there is a downtrend for that metric in that period.
Flat would mean that there is no significant trend.
–, it means that there is insufficient data (i.e. min three data points required).

More precisely, Up would be when the slope is greater than or equal to 0.5, and Down would be when the slope is lesser than or equal to -0.5.

You might also have observed that the Up and Down are colored in green or red and noticed that Up is sometimes green, and red at other times. The coloring is based on my personal understanding of what constitutes a good sign. If I think that it is a good sign for that metric to be trending up then it will be colored Up. Likewise, if I think that it is a bad sign for that metric to be trending up then it will be colored Up.

Of course, you might not agree with me on my definition of good/bad signs for some of the metrics, and I would be happy to hear your feedback.

Happy investing!