Investable Universe: The List Behind Every Stock Screen

Two traders run what they call the same momentum screen on Monday morning. Both rank US equities by six-month price change, both take the top twenty, and both trust the…

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Cross-Impact in Trading: How One Order Moves Another

An index future ticks higher on a burst of buying. A beat later, the best offer on one of its larger constituents lifts by a couple of cents, and the…

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Price Discovery: How Markets Turn Orders Into Prices

A company reports earnings after the close, the print lands a little ahead of estimates, and by the time the stock reopens it's trading four percent higher. Stare at that…

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Read more about the article NTAP +542%: the base breakout that ran with the Nasdaq, August 1999
NTAP on the 1999-08-12 breakout entry, from my chart archive

NTAP +542%: the base breakout that ran with the Nasdaq, August 1999

NTAP is back on traders' screens this week, in the days after its latest quarterly report, so it's worth pulling an old chart back up and reading it properly. The…

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Trade Sign Classification: How Order Flow Gets Signed

Pull a single day of time and sales for any active stock and you'll get a tidy column of prints: a price, a size, a timestamp, sometimes a venue code.…

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Liquidity Resilience: How Markets Rebuild Their Depth

A single market order can strip the visible book in a blink. Picture the best offer showing 4,000 shares, and then a buyer lifts 12,000 in one print. The top…

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Opening and Closing Auctions: How the Single Price Forms

The last number printed on a chart at the close is the one everybody quotes. It sets the daily candle, the mark on your brokerage statement, the figure a fund…

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Hawkes Process: Why Market Events Arrive in Clusters

Watch a fast tape for a few minutes and the rhythm gives itself away. Trades, quote changes, and cancellations don't arrive like a metronome. The book goes quiet, then a…

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Event Study: How to Read Abnormal Returns From News

A headline crosses the wire: a stock "jumped 4% after earnings." It reads like a clean reaction, cause and effect in one line. Then you pull up the tape and…

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Log Returns vs Simple Returns: What Traders Must Know

A stock closes up 10 percent on Monday and down 10 percent on Tuesday. Add the two moves and you get zero, so the week looks like a wash. The…

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