One of the biggest mistakes I see traders make is showing up to the market every day without an actual system.
Most people start the same way. They open a pre-market gainer scanner, maybe a pre-market loser scanner, and they watch whatever stocks are exploding. Some look for consolidation breaks to buy, others try to short them as they move up. When the market opens, they move to relative volume scanners, top gainers, and top losers.
Everyone is looking at the exact same things.
And that’s the problem.
That isn’t a system. That’s just filtering through noise all day.
If someone asked what you do in the market and your answer was, “I show up and look at whatever stocks are up the most,” that’s not really a strategy someone could learn from.
A real system is specific.
For example, my focus for the last five years has been overnight momentum. I look for stocks closing strong into the last 20 minutes of the day on elevated relative volume with a catalyst. Stocks that close well often follow through overnight, especially when liquidity thins out after hours and short sellers begin covering.
Instead of staring at scanners all day, I built filters that look for exactly those conditions.
Every day in the last 20 minutes of the market, those filters usually surface one to three stocks. I quickly review the news, check for dilution risk, and decide if it’s worth taking overnight.
The entire process takes about 20 minutes a day and we even hop on voice chat to discuss in real time!
The big shift for most traders is realizing you shouldn’t be watching everything. You should be eliminating 95% of the market and only getting alerts when your exact setup appears.
That’s the power of building filters.
You don’t need to be a programmer to do it either. Tools like Trade Ideas make it easy to turn your strategy into scanners so the market comes to you instead of you chasing it all day.
Right now Trade Ideas is running a St. Patrick’s Day sale with 25% off.
If you want to build a real system instead of watching top gainers all day, it’s one of the best tools you can use.
You can unlock the discount here and use code SOT25.
Best,
Kyle
PS: A case study of How I used Trade Ideas to Catch a 293% Winner in $BNAI