Our service offers a number of features that are unique and potentially profitable. Without an excess of horn-tooting…

* A summary of the current day's stock market action based on data-crunching, not on one person's interpretations (check out our rant on the financial media's day end summaries).  The idea is simply to identify trends as they're developing, not weeks or months after the fact.  On a daily basis, it's not uncommon for the best performing groups in our daily market summaries to outgain the worst by 5%.

With our daily market summary, you can discern which of more than 60 indicators (industry, volume, volatility, moving averages, fundamentals, and much more) did the best job of predicting gains and losses. The summary is normally available about 4 hours after the market close Monday through Thursday, possibly later on days prior to the weekend or holidays. Should we fail to post the summary before the next trading session for some unexpected reason (e.g. failure of our data provider, a glitch on our server or local computer), we'll simply extend your subscription as appropriate.

Check out our current summaries here, or summaries for every trading session in the last 20 years here (bottom of the page).  Before that, however, you'll want to understand our style of presentation…go here.

The market summary is unique and useful in a number of ways: 

1)   We look at market performance according to a large number of groupings (not only industry-based).  If stocks with, say, high yearlong gains are trending upwards, you'll know.  Others won't.

2)  Not only do you learn which groups are leading and lagging the market, but our "Market Focus" indicator gives you a feeling for the statistical significance of these moves...are these moves flukes or is something noteworthy evolving?

3)  Our "Similar Markets" feature shows which of several thousand trading sessions the current session most resembles.  You can then look at summaries for these "mirror" markets and see how these markets continued to evolve.

* Seasonal Charts.  How does Microsoft perform in July?  Are cyclical stocks particularly cyclical with respect to the seasons?  How does Intel perform on a quarterly basis?  How does Cisco perform before and after dividends?  Before and after earnings?  Before and after options expirations?  What's the best time of the month to own banking stocks?  Our seasonal charts give you clues as to the tendencies of various stocks and indices to prosper or suffer at specific times of the year.

* Historical, seasonal data. What are the best indicators for gains or losses in March? How about the third quarter of the year? When trying to profit via the January effect, would it be better to look at December losses or yearlong losses, or yet another indicator?  Should I expect stocks that performed well last November to do so again, or is it more likely that these stocks will underperform?

We've scoured near to mid-term (24 years or less) historical data for various trends, and have found many that are quite significant from a statistical point of view. If you believe these trends will continue into the future, just reference our current indicator data against our seasonal data, and choose stocks that fit the historic trend.  A typical objection to our approach is that 24 data points wouldn't be enough to draw any conclusions regarding statistical significance...to which we reply that we're not looking at 24 data points representing index values, but thousands representing individual stocks!

We've also conducted a number of surveys on longer term data, going back 20 years or more.  Again, we've identified a good quantity of patterns that tend to repeat.

The seasonal data is presented in a simple html format. You'll need to familiarize yourself with our presentation of data, but it shouldn't be overly challenging.  After you understand our style of presentation, you can go here to look at a typical summary of historical data. In this case, it's a "risk-adjusted" file for the entire month of February. We also break years into quarters.

The focus here is on providing investors with novel, yet common-sensical, tools for making the right investment at the right time. Scanning our data, investors may uncover patterns that we've missed entirely. The focus definitely isn't on spoon-feeding investors with stock picks.

* Market Commentary.  A couple years ago, we'd only sporadically offer commentary, in the belief that folks are already inundated with market commentary.  But folks seemed to appreciate our terse synopsis of recent events, and now we post after almost every market session in our  market trends diary.  We may also blather ad-nauseum on a particular subject over a course of days, use it as a forum to discuss our viewers' queries, pose questions of our own, or inform viewers about changes on the site.  The idea is to add a bit of humanity to the site, even if that humanity does tend toward cynicism.

The market diary was added in October of 2003.  We've touched on momentum investing, contrarian investing, charting with seasonal considerations, industry cycles, the role of taxation in short term and long term seasonal effects, and more...including some market effects we won't disclose to the public at large.  Our mouthings are usually grounded in analysis...not anecdotes.

* Our current indicator values. If, for example, you expect bottom fishing to produce gains over the next few weeks, you can search for stocks that are trading near their lows. Other indicators involve momentum, market capitalization, recent and long-term performance, volume, industry group, volatility, differential between close and high, a large number of proprietary indicators, and more ( see the complete list here).  

Most of the proprietary indicators are based on a search for stock-to-stock correlations.  In other words, we search for stocks that have, historically, done a good job of predicting gains (or losses) in other stocks, and then asking whether these "predictive" stocks currently point toward gains or losses in the "predictee" stock that we want to examine.  Thus, while the majority of indicators you come across in the financial media are simply manipulations of price and volume data, our proprietary indicators are only indirectly related to price and volume data.  At the same time, they're based on common sense!...at some point, every investor has noticed that some stocks seem especially sensitive to the movement of other stocks.

Our current indicator data is perfectly searchable…you download the text file yourself, and manipulate the data to your own ends. As such, it's useful to have some skill with a spreadsheet program like Microsoft Excel. The data is not intended as a stock-quote download service, however, so we will not list daily volume, or high, open, and low values…only percentage differences.

Our indicator files contain data for about 2300 stocks. If you can't find your own favorite stock in the file, let us know and we can probably add it. You may also recommend new indicators, though we're normally a bit stubborn about making changes to our system.  If you would like to recommend a stock, it would be helpful if you'd tell us which of our numerical industry groups it falls into.  If you'd like to recommend an indicator, let us know the underlying algorithm.

Download a file here.  

* Stock Summaries.  Here, we use our software to detect patterns in individual stocks, as opposed to the market as a whole.  Take a look.

* More!!  The software we've written can be applied to numerous market analysis situations.  Recently, for example, we applied it to discover patterns of insider buying and selling.  Which inside buyers tend to fare better...officers, directors, large shareholders (10% or more), or "others"?  Does the price performance shortly before or after an insider buy or sell have any bearing on the stock's longer-term outcome?  Are large purchases automatically more bullish than smaller purchases?  Which insiders have a recent history of large gains? We have some answers.

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Still confused over the functionality of the site?  Take a look at a synopsis that was written for another investment service.  The article begins with a discussion of the January effect, and segues into a promo for our site.

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