Welcome to our video on the Trading Central Technical Insight tool which is available on the National Bank Direct Brokerage transactional platform. Technical Insight allows investors of all skill levels to optimize their trading strategies through actionable technical analysis on individual stocks and ETFs.
You can simply type in your symbol, or you can use their powerful customizable search tool to find trade ideas. Our video today will concentrate on finding trade ideas by using their search criteria via the filtering tool and how you can use it to quickly identify potential investment ideas.
The Technical Insight tool can be accessed via the market’s heading and then select Trading Central from the drop-down menu. Technical Insight gives you the screening power to sift through pretty much every publicly traded security. Now before we delve into the screening tool if we scroll down the page a bit we can see my recently viewed stocks that are saved here.
Below that section, Technical Insight also provides you with a list of stocks and ETFs viewed by all of their clients. For example, if you want to know what most investors are looking at this will allow you to view their most viewed bullish symbols, their most popular ones, what’s trending now and finally at the bottom we have most viewed bearish events that you can consult as well.
Now let’s take a look at their screening tool that you can access by clicking on the briefcase icon shown here, for stocks and ETFs. Once the page loads, we are now directly in their search tool. Let’s jump right into an example to show you how Technical Insight can help you find promising opportunities.
The first step is to choose the market you’re interested in, the default setting is Canada but the drop down menu lets you choose a specific exchange whether Canadian or U.S. You could for example choose the Nasdaq if you wanted to concentrate on technology stocks but for today I’ll stick to the Toronto stock exchange.
You can then choose one of the preset lists shown here, some of these lists are theme inspired like 5g or ESG. One can choose a long-term uptrend if you’re bullish or a specific sector and even volume leaders. To the right if you’re interested in a specific industry you can choose from one of the 55 on their list and finally we have the opportunity type which can be bullish, bearish and other or leave it all.
Now that we have a general sense of the screener let me draw your attention to the powerful filters, with a few quick selections you can narrow down the results to best match your needs.
Your first step is to narrow down the universe of your search, you might select only ETFs or if you plan on using options instead of buying the stock you would choose stocks with options or leave it blank to include all stocks. You can use the market capitalization section to refine your search and choose from large, medium or small cap stocks or simply leave the default option to all.
Below we have the TC Quantamental Rating which is an automated stock ranking tool that analyzes stocks from a fundamental and technical perspective looking at the company’s earnings, P\E ratio, momentum and price and then ranks the securities from a scale of one to ten.
Ten being the most bullish and one the most bearish, basically it allows you to combine fundamental and technical analysis together. Let’s set it to six to filter out the bearish and the weak bullish stocks.
Moving on to the next section which is price and volume many people will enter a price range to filter out penny stocks or stocks whose share price is very high. Below you’ll see a volume filter where you can set a minimum volume to focus on stocks that have enough trading liquidity to avoid price swings when entering a position or when closing it out.
We’ve now reached the technical event filter; this is where you will truly appreciate what Technical Insight can do for you. We can start by specifying the preferred chart period, daily or weekly or leave it blank to include both. Now we can move towards more specific technical analysis events let’s start with classic patterns which typically have a longer-term horizon and provide you with a price target which is helpful in trying to determine an exit price.
Since classic patterns provide you with a target price you can also specify a possible price move as well let’s say 15%. Now going back to the classic patterns category, we can either choose the entire category or you can select one or more of the 28 classic patterns shown here.
Let’s choose the ascending continuation triangle and a little further down the head and shoulders bottom and right away the tool has filtered out matches for you to consider.
Before going further, I wanted to mention that Technical Insight has an education center that you can consult that explains all these technical events I’ll come back to it a little bit later.
Now here we have the name and symbol of the company as well as the industry it’s in. To the right we have the technical event and the day that it happened and finally the closing price and below that the price target.
Now for those of you are a little more visual we can click on the rectangle shown here and we can view them in chart format, the chart shows you if this pattern is intermediate or long term as well as maybe give you a better idea of how the formation looks like.
Now let’s head back to the other screen, moving further down the list we have the candlesticks and bar patterns these technical event opportunities are useful for suggesting possible short-term price movements. They are also useful for supporting or refuting the possible price movements suggested by classic patterns.
Just like in our previous example we can select the entirety of the category, or we can specify specific pattern from their available list. Let’s choose the hammer pattern as our example and see the matches that we have.
As you can see Technical Insight quickly scans the universe of stocks and charts and identifies those that meet your selected criteria based on the previous evening’s close.
Our next section is on indicators which shows the average value of a securities price over a period of time. What that means is that moving averages can help identify the price trend of the security either going up or down or staying neutral. Finally, we have oscillators which are chart indicators that can assist the trader in determining overbought or oversold conditions.
Most traders will use multiple oscillators to confirm the price direction, here we have a list of 11 and let’s select the relative strength index commonly referred to as the RSI which gives us a few candidates. Now if we view them in the chart version you can see that an RSI under 30 is considered oversold but the selected stocks have now crossed back over that barrier which is a bullish signal.
As previously mentioned for those of you who are new to technical analysis Trading Central has an education section just for you in the upper right hand corner shown as a book icon. Here we have a complete list of the technical events shown with a definition as well as how to interpret them.
How about we look at the hammer which falls under short term and bullish and is the fourth one on the list. Here we have the implication, the description, trading considerations as well as other criteria that you can read up on.
There is also a find events button you can click on which brings you back to the filter page with a list of securities with the hammer technical event. Finally once you’ve made your choices Technical Insight lets you save your search criteria by clicking on the subscribe button shown here.
You need to name your search criteria let’s call ours hammer and click on ok, it’s now been added to our alerts section with your saved search parameters and every day this list will be updated but better still if you add your email address you will be advised via email of new additions.
This concludes our first video on how to find trading ideas with our Technical Insight tool please join us for the second video on how to look up individual securities and set up alerts in our watch list.