Trendentum

Each rule below (RSI, MACD, moving-average trend, volume, and for US stocks, insider trading) independently looks at a stock's price history and "votes" BUY or SELL - or stays silent if it doesn't see anything worth flagging that day. The action shown on a signal card is simply whichever side, BUY or SELL, got more votes. If the votes are tied, or nothing fired at all, the call is HOLD.

"Confidence" is the share of the rules that had an opinion which agreed with the final call - for example, if 3 of the 4 rules that fired both pointed to BUY, that's 75% confidence. It is not a probability that the stock will go up, and it isn't a measure of how "good" the stock is - it's purely a measure of how much the indicators below currently agree with each other. Low confidence just means the signals are mixed, not that the call is wrong; high confidence isn't a guarantee either. Read the actual reasons underneath every call - that's where the substance is.

RSI is a number from 0 to 100 that measures how fast and how much a stock's price has been moving up versus down recently (usually over the last 14 trading days). Think of it as a speedometer for buying and selling pressure, not for the price level itself - it says nothing about whether a stock is "cheap" or "expensive."

When there's been a lot more buying than selling lately, RSI climbs toward 100. When there's been a lot more selling than buying, it falls toward 0. As a rule of thumb (not a law of physics): RSI below 30 is called "oversold" - the price has fallen quickly, and some traders watch for a possible bounce, though a genuine downtrend can also keep RSI low for a long stretch. RSI above 70 is called "overbought" - the price has risen quickly, and some traders watch for a possible pullback, though a strong uptrend can also keep RSI high for a long stretch.

MACD compares two moving averages of the price - a faster one and a slower one - to gauge whether upward or downward momentum is building or fading. When the faster average crosses above the slower one, chart-watchers call it a "bullish crossover": the price has recently started climbing more strongly than its own longer-term trend. When the faster average crosses below the slower one, that's a "bearish crossover" - the opposite.

MACD is built entirely from past prices, so it tends to confirm a move slightly after it's already started rather than predict one in advance. It's most useful as one confirmation among several, not as a standalone early-warning system.

A moving average smooths out day-to-day noise by averaging the closing price over a set number of days - a "20-day average" is just the average of the last 20 closing prices, recalculated every day as new prices come in. Comparing a short average (e.g. 20-day) against a longer one (e.g. 50-day) shows whether the recent trend is running stronger or weaker than the bigger-picture trend.

When the short-term average crosses above the long-term one, it's often called a "golden cross" and read as momentum turning up. When it crosses below, that's a "death cross," read as momentum turning down. Both are confirmations of a move that has already been underway for a while - by definition, they can't catch the very start of a new trend.

Volume is simply how many shares changed hands on a given day. On its own it doesn't say whether a stock went up or down, but comparing it to a recent average shows how much conviction was behind a price move. If a stock jumps on unusually heavy volume, many traders read that as more likely to stick, since a lot of market participants bought in to push the price. The same move on very light volume can mean the opposite - a handful of trades moving a thin, easily-swayed price.

This platform flags a "volume spike" whenever a day's volume is well above (by default, 1.5x or more) its own trailing 20-day average.

In the US, company insiders - executives, directors, and large shareholders - are legally required to publicly disclose, via a "Form 4" filed with the SEC, whenever they buy or sell shares of their own company on the open market. Trendentum pulls these filings directly from SEC EDGAR (a free, public government database) and tallies up insider buying versus selling over roughly the last six months.

Some investors read heavy insider buying as a vote of confidence, since insiders know their own business better than any outsider - and heavy insider selling the opposite way. But insiders also sell for entirely ordinary personal reasons unrelated to the company's prospects (buying a house, diversifying savings, tax planning, a pre-scheduled trading plan), so this is one data point to weigh, not a verdict. This data only exists for US-listed companies; ASX and TSX companies report to different regulators (ASIC and the OSC/CSA) and aren't covered here yet.

Unlike the signals above, which look at one stock at a time, factor rankings compare every stock in your portfolio against each other - the same basic approach professional quant funds use to decide which of the stocks they already like are the most attractive right now, relative to one another.

Trendentum currently uses two factors: momentum (how much the price has risen over the last 3 and 6 months - stocks that have been rising tend to keep rising for a while, though momentum can reverse sharply and without warning) and low volatility (how calm or choppy the price has been over the last 60 trading days - many investors treat a calmer ride as lower-risk for a similar return). Each holding is ranked from best to worst on each factor against only the other stocks you hold, then the two rankings are averaged into one composite score. A high composite score describes a stock's characteristics relative to your other holdings right now - it is not a price prediction, and a top-ranked stock can still fall.

Trendentum follows the same exchange-suffix convention Yahoo Finance uses to tell markets apart: a plain symbol with no suffix (e.g. AAPL) is assumed to be US-listed. Add .AX for the Australian Securities Exchange (e.g. BHP.AX), .TO for the Toronto Stock Exchange (e.g. RY.TO), or .V for the TSX Venture Exchange (e.g. GOLD.V). Using the right suffix matters because it's how the platform knows which exchange - and which data source and regulator - to look the stock up under.