Smart Money on US stocks
Level:
Short version for experts: tables, lists and screenshots only.
Words in this lesson (11)
Gap — A jump in price: today trading opened noticeably higher or lower than it closed yesterday. Closed at 100 yesterday, opened at 108 today — an 8% gap up.
Short — Selling in the hope that the price will fall: you sell something borrowed, then buy it back cheaper. You make money when the price drops.
Stop — A price chosen in advance at which the trade is closed at a loss, so the loss doesn't grow bigger.
Volume — How much money or how many units changed hands over a period. A move on high volume is more reliable than one on low volume.
Candle — A bar on the chart for one stretch of time: where the price opened, where it closed, its high and its low.
Level — A price where the market has already turned before. Support is below the price, resistance is above it.
Setup — A ready trading rule: under what condition to enter, in which direction, where the stop and the target are.
Screener — A filtering program: it scans hundreds of stocks or coins and shows only those that match the given criteria.
Premarket — Trading before the exchange's main session opens. There are few participants, and the price moves easily.
Liquidity — How easy it is to buy or sell the size you need without moving the price. Little liquidity — hard to get in and out.
Position — An open trade: what you have bought or sold and haven't closed yet.
Same strategy, different market
The idea is the same as in crypto: MAMAY marks up liquidity, imbalance and structure, and the screener shows where they have lined up. What Smart Money is in plain words — in the lesson linked below. Here's what's special about US stocks.
Which stocks
The Smart Money USA screener takes the day's most liquid stocks; the turnover threshold is adjustable. Candles are regular session only (9:30–16:00 New York time): liquidity is thin in pre-market and after-hours, so a sweep there means little.
How stocks differ from crypto
- A day has only 7 hourly candles. Setups are rarer than in crypto and often stretch over several days.
- 4H is built from regular-session hourly candles, on the exchange clock: two such candles a day. 1D is the usual daily candles.
- The overnight gap. In the morning price can open straight past a level, with no wick. That's not a sweep: the stops were filled at the open. Check how the open relates to the level before trusting the markup around a gap.
- Earnings and news break any structure. Better not to hold a setup position into the stock's earnings — the date is in "US Earnings".
- Shorting — only if your broker can borrow the stock. A short setup on a hard-to-borrow name may be impossible to execute.
↗ Open "Smart Money USA" in MAMAY ▶ The Smart Money strategy in plain words