Introducing the Gap Tool

What is the Gap Tool?

Scanners are great, but sometimes they can be inconvenient because:

1. They can find setups but they take a long time to look through.
2. They aren’t pushed to you as an alert or notification, you have to monitor them yourself.
3. They’re often not on the same screen as the chart of the stock you’re looking for, so they’re out of context.

This tool takes all the great parts of a scanner (i.e. helping you find profitable trades) and eliminates the inconveniences too.

The Gap Tool identifies unusually volatile large cap stocks that have gapped up/down by more than 1.0% pre-market. It then pushes alerts to your phone and laptop as a Discord message accompanied by a screenshot of the chart at the instant of the alert and a link to the chart on TradingView (Figure 1).

Let’s take a closer look at the criteria for an alert to be triggered:

1. We scan over 100 large cap stocks
2. Its daily Average True Range (ATR) must be higher than its 14-day ATR; aka it’s unusually volatile relative to its past behavior. This ensures we’re not just sending the same 5 volatile large caps every day!
3. It has a gap larger than 1.0% in either direction. The gap is calculated as GAP = (market_open — prior_market_close) / prior_market_close
4. It is a gap that has formed overnight and is still in effect during pre-market and at market open

So what?

This tool will hopefully help identify potential gap trades. What’s that?

Gaps in a stock chart occur when the price of a stock moves suddenly up or down, usually in response to news outside of market hours. In some cases, these gaps don’t last — rather, they’re “filled” as trading action brings the price back towards the previous close. These gap fills present opportunities for trading. (Center Point Securities)

TL;DR although gaps don’t always fill right away, they often do. Thus, they can be high-probability trades to start off the day.

The best part is that this tool is completely free. Just join ScaleTrade’s free Discord server here to get access.

Get access to a growing suite of custom trading tools for free

ScaleTrade is a fast-growing trading technology startup founded by Andre (AI/ML engineer and data scientist), Conor (quantitative developer), and Matthew (managerial consultant and community manager).

All three founders want to leverage their decades of combined experience to build valuable tools for the trading community. But, we need your help. We need to know what the biggest pain points are for pro-level traders so that we can inform the next tool that we build.

We figured the best way to get as much feedback as possible, as fast as possible, was to make a free Discord that anyone can join. But, it’s ideal for a serious trader with $30k-$500k in account balance who has a structured trading system. If that’s you, come tell us the most time-consuming part of your trading process, and let’s see if we can build you a custom tool to automate it, all for free. See you there!

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