"Can I Do Sector Relative Strength Calculations in Trade-Ideas?"

Here's a reader question from MabeKit subscriber, Jeremy Q. (name used with permission, question lightly edited for clarity).

Jeremy Q:

Is it possible to build a very specific sector relative strength Top List in Trade-Ideas? Custom baskets of stock, robotics, photonics, fiber, satellite, etc.

Average the RVOL, %change from Open, etc, and then rank them?

I'm using Gemini to do a version in Python now, but I have Trade-Ideas and I thought you might have an easier solution.

Dave:

Yes, Trade-Ideas has a nice way to do this based on one of my favorite features I added to the program over a decade ago.

On both the alert and top list windows in Trade-Ideas, there's a setting you can turn on called CSV Logging.

In the main TI window, go to Tools, Options and check the box for Display the CSVLogger tool. See image below:

Once enabled, you'll now see an Alert Logging option at the bottom of the context menu on all your alert and top list windows:

Check the Alert Logging box in a window, and it will write a CSV file to the TradeIdeasPro directory every time there's an update to the window.

Now, you can set up top list windows for whatever sector you want to track, along with thresholds for each.

Then you can process these CSV files and do interesting things with them.

For example, you could have a Python script parse them and compare stats across sectors.

An even simpler idea might be to create a single top list that spans all sectors, add the sector as a column, and use a minimum value of 3 for relative volume.

Now you can parse a single CSV file and group by sector to show sectors with the largest number of symbols trading significantly above their relative volume.

There are lots of creative things you can do with the real-time CSV output if you put your mind to it.

This unlimited flexibility is why I love this feature so much.

Thanks for sharing with the group, Jeremy!

(BTW, I'm pretty sure this one feature has created more P&L for traders than any other feature I added to Trade-Ideas - by a large margin. But that's a story for another day.)

-Dave

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