Frequently Asked Questions
What is the purpose of Market Filters?
Market Filters has four main areas of features:
- Scanning (filtering) the market. This feature helps users narrow down to one or several stocks they will want to consider for a trade. Without using a filter it's too hard finding stocks that really fit the criteria being searched for. We take approximately 10,000 stocks and search for exactly the type you want. An example filter could be "Stocks showing as underbought by RSI, consistently below it's 50-day moving average for the past 20 days and with positive EPS."
- Back-testing. There is no better way to gain confidence in a strategy (ie: a grouping of technical indicators) than by actually running it through years of historical intra-day data. Use this feature to compare the performance of buy signals and select the best one to use for real trading.
- Customizing indicators. Don't like that the default number of days to look backwards for Bolling Bands is 10? Change it to any other value and use it to filter or back-test.
- Watch stocks. Don't have money to trade with yet? Want to test a buy signal in real-time without committing capital yet? Add stocks to your watch list and treat it like a real portfolio.
Market Filters is a tool, not a financial advisor. Neither is it intended as an automated trading platform.
What is a Filter?
A Filter is a group of one or more technical indicators. A Filter is primarily used to scan the market to find stocks meeting it's criteria, for example looking for oversold stocks.
What are the OB, OS and N icons shown for a stock?
The icons below will appear for a stock to signify whether the top-performing filters consider it to be Oversold, Overbought, or Neutral.
| Oversold | Neutral | Overbought |
|---|---|---|
 |  |  |
Is Market Filters only for testing strategies?
Not at all, that's only part of the functionality. Once you have found a strategy (either through testing or any other means) you can run filters (scans) that evaluate the entire market to rank all stocks using your strategy. This lets your narrow the field of stocks you are considering trading and make a final decision.
I don't see the indicator I want, what do I do?
Request it using the feedback feature. The full range of indicators is still being built out. If there's one you need we'll move it to the top of the list and it will be available within hours or days.
How much market data do you have? How often does it update?
Our data is currently sampled over 15 times a day during market hours. We have over 3 years of granular market data and access to many more years of end-of-day data, although that is not as useful for testing active trading strategies.
How does Market Filters compare to other tools?
Market Filters is different in several ways:
- No programming is required
- Access to a library of complex indicators
- Generate reports showing top-ranked stocks using your strategies on current market data
- Multiple years of granular market data, not just end-of-day
- New types of technical indicators can be added any time
- No software to install, use it from any computer
- Get reports on your strategies on current data during market hours - No need to wait until after the markets close
- Access to data from multiple exchanges, tracking almost 10,000 stocks, updated over 15 times per day
- No need to purchase separate data feeds for backtesting, it's all in our database
- Full list of features
Other tool X allows me to program my own strategies, can I do that here?
Market Filters is not a programming platform. When programming strategies a person is typically trying to combine several base algorithms into one. Market Filters does this by allowing multiple indicators to be used simultaneously while also providing parameters to adjust for each one. The added flexibility of programming custom indicators is normally not justified by the small benefit.
But, having said that, please let us know of indicators you would like to see. We are more than happy to add them.
How do the Market Filters scoring algorithms work?
Each indicator runs independently on the market data and contributes to a score for each stock. A higher score means that stock fits that indicator well. When multiple indicators are combined their respective scores are added up to produce a final score.
Achieving the best results is not easy. The goal is for each indicator to produce the same average score otherwise some indicators will have more weight than others.
Market Filters also has the concept of "negative indicators". For example there is an indicator that filters out any stock with a negative EPS. It does this by finding all such stocks and adding a large negative score to them.
Where does the back-test data for filter comparison come from?
Market Filters periodically runs a large number of filters through our back-testing tool. We capture all the results and make them available. We also use this data to feed into the FilterRating for a stock. We combine the scores of the top-performing filters to generate an Oversold, Overbought or Neutral rating for a stock.
What are the symbols ending in .PK, .OB and .TO?
These indicate stocks on exchanges aside from NYSE, Nasdaq and AMEX. .PK is the Pink Sheets Electronic Quotation. .OB is the OTCBB exchange. .TO is the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX).
What is the privacy policy?
Market Filters does not give, rent, or sell individual information to any third party. Your email will only ever be used to transmit information you request to receive on the website such as backtesting reports. The website uses a cookie to maintain your session but it expires as soon as your browser window is closed.
Further, we have no intention to ever work with a third party to market "products you may be interested in."
Who created Market Filters?
The tools behind Market Filters were created by investors with a computer-science background several years ago. After years of daily use it became clear that other traders would find them useful as well and the Market Filters website was created.