Trader’s Narrative

I just found a very cool tool over at the NY Times website which allows you to quickly identify high relative strength stocks. I love the graphical user interface. It is very intuitive and makes using the tool actually quite fun.

Each stock is represented by a circle whose size denotes market capitalization. All the stocks in a sector are shown within the four quadrants of the grid. They are classified as either slipping, leading, lagging, or improving depending on their relative performance to the S&P500. You can also change the length of the look back period (day, week, quarterly and annual).

As you cursor over the stocks or circles, you’re shown detailed data, both on the grid and to the right side where all the stocks in the sector are listed:

As you can see above, within the energy sector, it shows Weatherford as the stock with the highest relative strength (for the past quarter). And if you click on Weatherford on the right hand side menu, a small graph will popup showing you both the price action of the stock and the S&P500 index (covering the time period you’ve chosen). There are some other goodies that pop up within the right hand side menu but I’ll leave you to explore that on your own.