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I’ve waited patiently for weeks and weeks for TDAmeritrade to come out with StrategyDesk 2.0. Or maybe StrategyDesk 1.1. Hell, I’d be excited to see version 1.01. As I’ve said over and over, the clunky interface and next- to- useless documentation are hindering what appears to be a very promising piece of software.

Instead, we’re nearing the end of February and are still stuck with v1.0 and a manual that looks like a non- English- speaking 8th-grader wrote it. I figured about the time I went to the trouble to do some annotated screenshots and a minor tutorial, they’d release a real users manual and my effort would have been in vain. So far, nothing. So here goes- if you want to get your feet wet with StrategyDesk, maybe this will help get you started.

I’m going to focus tonight on what I feel is the most important ability of StrategyDesk: its real-time scanning capability.

First, you’ve got to have a very clear idea what you want to do. You never realize how “flexible” all your trading rules are until you try to put them in writing, or even better, program them. You’ll often find that your “rules” have so many “exceptions” that they aren’t really rules at all. More like suggestions, if that, and your constant bending of them causes you great agony in the end.

I’ll write more about this in a separate article, but in scanning for potential daytrades what we’re trying to do is simultaneously narrow the field and improve the quality of candidates with each “rule” or criteria we add. For instance, the first “cut” many daytraders make is with gaps. Not all stocks that make a big run start with a gap, and not all gaps result in big runs (in fact, if you read my ramblings I’m sure you know one of my favorite plays is on an Opening Gap Reversal), but requiring a gap can drastically reduce your workload and improve your odds- you might be looking at a list of 100 stocks of which 20 are likely to be strong winners, as opposed to 5000 stocks of which 50 are. Yes, you cut out some winners, but you improve the quality of the remaining field by an exponential amount.

Ideally, we’d continue to add this requirement and that filter, and end up with a list of 5 stocks with 4 very likely winners. That’s a little pie- in- the- sky (at a certain point additional criteria do more harm than good), but you see what I’m getting at. We can’t mourn for every winner we may have excluded; that’s not what’s important. What we want is a small, strong set of candidates, and then we use our chart-reading, executions, stops and money management to spank those puppies.

Ok, so we’ve fired up StrategyDesk and arranged our layout. I close everything except three windows:

(not clickable, just for show)

• Window 1 is my intraday chart, ranging from 3min to 30min bars. I do not use this chart to make trades! It’s too clunky. I have Medved Quotetracker (another freebie) running on the other monitors for that.

• Window 2 is a daily chart, about 30-40 bars long. I cannot overemphasize the importance of knowing exactly where a stock is on its daily chart when you’re trying to daytrade it. Daily bar support/resistance levels play a large role in intraday thrusts and reversals, and without them you’re driving blind.

• Window 3 is my Screener window, which shows the real-time results of whichever scan I have running at the moment.

Let’s Build That Screener!

For this example, I’m going to use a setup that most of you have seen or traded already: the famous 30-minute pullback to the 5ema. Sounds pretty simple, no? Au Contraire! Read on…

I like stocks over $20, and I like stocks with reliable volume. You may not agree, and you may make millions on lower-priced, thinly-traded stocks. More power to you. But they give me gas. So the first thing I want to do is reduce my universe of candidates to stocks over $20 with a 30-day average daily volume of over 200,000 shares. So far, I have found no way to screen for average volume with StrategyDesk, other than to take today’s volume, today minus one, today minus two, etc for the past month, then add them up and divide by 30. Yeah, you gotta be kiddin’ me.

Also, StrategyDesk won’t scan “the stock market” as it is. You must choose a list of stocks on which the Screener operates. Here is where I saw an opportunity. But more about that in a minute.

SD (I’m tired of typing the name out) comes with only a handful of default symbol lists: The NDX, the S&P 500, the OEX, the S&P Midcap 400, the Dow, and the Nasdaq Financial 100. That’s right- the Nasdaq composite is not included! However, this is relatively straightforward to remedy:

• Go to the Nasdaq Market Site. Locate the option to download the Composite list to a spreadsheet.

• In the spreadsheet, delete all the rows and columns except for the ticker symbols. Now drag over them (guess you could do this without the deleting, but it’s clearer this way) and Copy & Paste them into Notepad.

• Once you have that long list (over 3000 stocks!) running down the left side of your Notepad window, do a Save As- and here’s the tricky part: save the file in your TD AMERITRADE\StrategyDesk\Symbols\Stock Indexes directory, and save it with the extension “.sym“. It’s still just a text file, but this way the Screener will recognize it as a symbol list.

Voila, you now have the Comp at your disposal. Now that we’ve walked through how to do it, you can collect any variety of symbol lists you like, and as for the Comp, you can see I’ve been there and done that, so feel free to grab the .sym file from me.

The opportunity I saw with this crazy symbol-list stuff was that I could include my volume screens via a pre-screened symbol list. I fired up a different program (Advanced Analyzer, yes, another freebie) and set up a screen for all the stocks over $20 and with average volume over 200k. I exported the results of that screen (about 1000 stocks) using the method described above. If you want to grab that one too, here it is. And now, only 85 lines of html later, we’re ready to start writing formulas.

My apologies, but it’s late, I’ve installed a new stereo in my car today, wired HyperLites onto my motorcycle, grilled for the girls, watched a movie with them, and gotta get up at 0530 to go to work. Will do my best to finish this article tomorrow night.