I built a swing trading scanner for the ASX. It watches the market, runs backtested patterns against the ASX 300 and a curated watchlist, and sends me one email at 7pm each weekday. If something meets the criteria, I get a signal with entry, stop loss, and target. If nothing meets the criteria, I get a short email that says so.
Most days, it says no.
That’s the point. The hardest part of trading isn’t finding opportunities. It’s not chasing them when they aren’t there. It’s watching a stock fall 20% and resisting the urge to catch the knife because it “feels” cheap. It’s sitting on your hands during a week when everything is red and your gut says surely this is the bottom.
The scanner doesn’t have a gut. It has rules. Backtested win rates, position sizing based on my actual capital, stop losses that trigger automatically. When the market is difficult — and right now it is — the tool does exactly what I need it to do: it keeps me out.
I get a Telegram message at 11am, 1pm, and 3:30pm to confirm or skip volume signals. A monthly report on the first of each month tells me how the patterns performed. That’s the entire interface. No charts to stare at. No portfolio dashboard refreshing every thirty seconds.
The discipline isn’t mine. It’s the system’s. I just have to listen to it, which turns out to be the hardest part of all.
It follows the same principle as the Google Insights tool I built for SEO: don’t give me a dashboard to stare at. Give me the answer and let me get on with my day.