Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Base and Break Trade - Dollar Tree Stores, Inc. (Public, NASDAQ:DLTR)

I use stockcharts.com to run end of day scans looking for strong base and break candidates. Last night I had three candidates - ATHR, GILD and DLTR. DLTR had the best chart with a NR7 bar yesterday hinting that price expansion was imminent.

The nice thing about DLTR was that it spent most of yesterday afternoon, basing in a NR at the base. So this morning I used a low risk, buy stop order on the open. As you can see from the chart, the trade required little attention other than moving my stop.



AMZN was a base & break on the 1 minute timeframe. I had a target of $71.25 and I folded when price fell back under that level, I know I missed a nice momo move of AMZN both long and short, but I loath to pick a top on a stock that's running a short squeeze.

End of day we a gravestone doji on the AMZN daily timeframe so I will be trading it again shortly.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Jamie,

Would you mind sharing the scans you use for finding base and break patterns using stockcharts.com

Thanks

Anonymous said...

Hi Jamie,

Great trade on DLTR !!!
Could you please share your SCAN when looking for base and break candidates with Stockcharts.com
Do you SCAN those every day ?
Thanks in advance,
Javier

TJ said...

Hey guys,

I'm basically scanning for stocks that closed above all the key MAs -10, 50, and 200 ie. very strong long setups. When the scan results are too long I add filters for ATR and/or ADX. I usually look for stocks trading an avg. volume of 1 M with an average price > $20.00.

I load the scan results in a folder then look at each chart to find good basing candidates.

I run two identical scans one for the NAZ and a second for the NYSE. The reason I do it this way is because the NYSE results are generally very long and I don't always get through the entire list.

Once I have picked my basing candidates from the daily timeframes, I look at the 15 minute timeframe to plan a possible entry strategy. The charts with NR bars on lower volume (NR7) seem to have the best results.

I know this is not a base & break scan per say. I'm not strong at writing code. Any ideas you can throw my way to enhance the scan would be greatly appreciated.

TJ said...

Javier,

I'd like to say that I scan for these every night but I don't. I usually only scan 2 times per week.

Anonymous said...

Thanks Jamie. I will think about the SCAN Dayly Base and Break Pattern and let you know if find something interesting. Javier :)