How This Works

Swing trading means holding a stock for days to weeks to capture a single directional price move, then exiting — rather than holding long-term or trading intraday.

• A stock builds up energy: it consolidates, forms a base, and approaches a resistance level.
• It breaks out above that level on strong volume.
• You ride the move for a few days until it hits your target or your stop.
• You exit and look for the next setup.

vs. day trading: Day traders open and close within the same session. Swing traders hold overnight and across days.

vs. buy-and-hold: Buy-and-hold investors hold for months or years regardless of short-term moves. Swing traders are in and out selectively.

The main risk is that overnight holds expose you to gap-downs on news. Disciplined stop placement and a minimum 2:1 reward-to-risk requirement — as enforced by this app — are how you manage that.

The source list now comes from the official TMX Listed Company Directory workbook.

• Exchange scope is TSX only.
• Symbols are normalized to Yahoo format (for example, ENB becomes ENB.TO).
• The parser keeps common-equity listings and filters out non-target instruments like ETFs, funds, trusts, debentures, rights, warrants, split shares, and preferreds.
• The result is cached locally and refreshed on a schedule, with stale-cache fallback if TMX is temporarily unavailable.

In practical terms, the funnel looks like this:

• The TMX source produces a broad TSX-common-equity candidate pool.
• The app hydrates market data and applies symbol health cooldowns to repeated failures.
• Liquidity, trend, breakout, risk/reward, upside-room, regime, and account-fit gates reduce the pool to the final signal universe.
• Because this is market- and gate-dependent, the final count is dynamic (often around the low hundreds rather than the full source list).

For each stock, the app pulls:

• About 6 months of daily price history.
• Recent volume data.
• Trend data like 20-day and 50-day moving averages.
• ATR, recent swing highs/lows, support, and resistance.
• Recent news headlines and publisher quality.
• A broad market regime check using the TSX index.

A stock is only called Trade-Ready if all of these are true:

• It fits your account size.
• Its max estimated loss stays within the account risk hard cap (default 3%).
• Your open positions are below your account's max concurrent limit.
• It is outside the earnings danger window (default hard-block within 7 days).
• It has actually broken above the recent breakout area.
• Volume is strong enough.
• The chart trend is aligned.
• Risk/reward is at least about 2:1 after friction.
• There is still enough upside room left (including ceiling headroom).
• The overall market regime allows it.

If a stock is close but not fully there, it usually ends up in Near-Breakout Monitor or Watchlist instead of Trade-Ready.

Trade-Ready stays strict on purpose. Near-Breakout has a slightly softer monitor profile (for example, lower minimum upside/risk-reward and less strict regime requirements) so you can track setups that are approaching validity without calling them execution-ready too early.

These checks are enforced, not advisory. If one fails, the setup cannot be Trade-Ready.

• Account Risk Gate: hard-block above 3% max-loss vs account size; caution shown at 2%+.
• Earnings Exclusion Gate: hard-block if earnings are within 7 calendar days; soft warning from 8-14 days.
• Max Concurrent Positions Gate: hard-block when open positions already fill the account cap.

Default max concurrent positions are account-tiered: 1 for smaller accounts (under about $1k), and 2 for larger small accounts ($1k+), unless manually overridden in rules.

The app is account-aware. It reads your journal balance and adjusts what counts as realistically tradable.

• Smaller accounts are pushed toward cheaper names and tighter capital-fit rules.
• The system checks if you can afford enough shares to make the trade meaningful.
• It also checks if the trade uses enough of your usable capital to matter.
• It enforces a max-loss cap against account size (risk hard-block at 3%, caution at 2%).
• It enforces a maximum number of simultaneous open positions by tier.
• If the stock is good but too expensive for your current balance, it goes into Too Expensive.

So the gate is not only asking, “Is this a good chart?” It is also asking, “Is this a good chart for your actual account size?”

The system uses account tiers with different preferred price bands:

As your account grows, the preferred price band expands automatically. So a stock at $65 might be "Too Expensive" for a $500 account (Small tier max $60) but become "Trade-Ready" once your balance crosses $750 into the Mid tier (max $100).

The engine supports three modes:

• Strict: fewer names, stronger confirmation needed.
• Balanced: middle ground.
• Loose: more names, weaker confirmation allowed.

Right now the product direction is to keep the live app focused on one balanced execution style, so the system does not drift into too many modes on-screen.

Themes are group context, like gold, energy, telecom, or clean energy.

Breadth means: how many stocks in that theme are also acting strong right now.

In the current version, theme is mostly context, not a hard blocker. That means a stock can still qualify even if its theme breadth is weak. The theme label is there to help you understand the backdrop, not to shut trades down automatically.

The app is trying to answer four plain questions:

1. Is this TSX stock liquid enough to matter?
2. Is the chart setup strong enough to deserve attention?
3. Is the broader market supportive enough right now?
4. Does this trade actually fit the size of your account?

Only when the answer stays good all the way down the chain does a stock become Trade-Ready.

• The universe snapshot can auto-refresh when it gets stale, or be rebuilt manually with Refresh.
• Market data calls use retry/backoff handling to reduce temporary provider errors.
• Symbols that repeatedly fail hydration are put on cooldown to avoid wasting scan capacity.
• Refresh logs track rejection reason totals so you can see which gates are blocking the most names.
• The app keeps a weekly scan report so you can review what the system has been finding over time.

This is a TSX swing-trade filter, not a crystal ball. It tries to reduce noise, focus attention on cleaner setups, and stop you from forcing trades that either do not fit the market or do not fit your account.

The real goal is not “find the most stocks.” The goal is “find the fewest stocks worth taking seriously.”