Quote Originally Posted by Harry View Post
Hi Mike,

Thank you for your informative posts as always. Curious as to what tools, if any, other than EV that you use to determine institutional selling?

Harry
Harry,
I do most of my analysis the old fashioned way and use EV to confirm or warn against taking a position when deciding to take a position. FWRD trades in average less than 140K shares per day. 68% of its shares are owned by institutions and another 8% by management. It is hard to conceive that a stock traded 529% of average volume on a big down day without significant institutional involvement.

I use two complementary methods to determine if institutions are accunulating stock. LEV rising while price moving sideways or down is one. The other method is taught by Bill O'Neil. The beginning of a base begins on the first down week after a closing weekly high and runs until the week prior to a breakout week. Looking at each week in the base one-by-one I determine one of four states for each one.
1. Closing up or down on lower volume than the week before.
2. Closing up on higher volume.
3. Closing lower than the week before in the lower 40% of the range on higher volume.
4. Closing lower than the week before in the upper 60% of the range on higher volume
Essentially #1 are don't care weeks, #2 and #4 are positive or support weeks and #3 are negative weeks. Then I do a simple count of #2 weeks and subtract #3 weeks. Buying breakouts of bases with a positive net count produces significantly better results than buying negative net count bases. #4 weeks are not counted but by labeling these support weeks we keep them out of the negative count.

I also do the above procedure on every daily bar and net the counts from both charts. I wrote code in eSignal to automatically label bars to facilitate this analysis.