Where to find strong US stocks. A step-by-step guide to narrowing down swing trade candidates from hundreds of S&P 500 and NASDAQ stocks

When you start swing trading US stocks, you hit a wall right away. That wall is the question of which stocks to buy. There are thousands of stocks in the US market, and news and social media are flooded with “stocks to watch” every single day. Rankings of stocks that have surged, trending earnings reports, and news about famous investors buying certain stocks. Even if you chase these, by the time you find them, they have often already peaked.

However, I do not believe that the reason candidate searching goes poorly is a lack of information. What is missing is a design for where to look and the order in which to narrow things down. What should be your population, what criteria should you use to measure strength, and in what order should you apply conditions? If these are not decided, you end up searching for stocks on a whim every time, leading to trades that lack reproducibility.

Conversely, if you turn the search method into a procedure, finding candidates becomes a task rather than a matter of intuition. Start from a wide range and narrow down in stages: market conditions, industry, price movement, performance, and finally, the chart. Discard any stocks that fall out at each stage without hesitation. Manage the 20 to 30 stocks that remain as your watchlist. Once you create this flow, you can prepare your candidates for the following week in one hour over the weekend. On weekday nights, you only need to look at the stocks you have narrowed down. By separating the search task from the trading decision task, it becomes easier to maintain the quality of your judgments even with limited time.

In this note, I have written in order—using S&P 500 and NASDAQ stocks as the population—the definition of what a strong stock is, screening conditions, performance verification, chart selection, and candidate management. The focus is on how to measure strength with numbers and the flow of narrowing down using hypothetical values.

Searching for strong stocks does not mean chasing stocks that have already surged. If you jump in after a big rise, you are likely to get caught at a high price. What you are looking for are stocks that continue to show stronger movement than the index but are not yet overheated. By replacing strength with measurable numbers—such as comparison with the index, distance from highs, trend shape, and performance—you can perform selection without relying on intuition.

This is intended for those who want to start swing trading US stocks, or those who spend too much time searching for candidates every time. It is structured so that if you can read a daily chart, you can reproduce the procedure. Note that all numerical values in this note are hypothetical examples for explanation purposes.

This concludes the free portion of the note. The following section is paid content, where I will explain the specific steps for narrowing down candidates, along with numerical examples.