Use Trade Ideas to find great stocks that are right for you

Trade Ideas makes developing your strategy more efficient by filtering through thousands of securities in the Canadian and U.S. markets. This can help narrow down the investment opportunities that are right for you.

You’ve probably been there. You have a specific idea in mind — maybe Artificial Intelligence (AI) stocks or stocks with upside momentum — and you’d like to narrow down the universe of companies and focus on those that could capitalize on your idea. With AI, for example, you might consider companies that are developing AI technology or companies that make the component parts that enable it. You might also look at companies that could use AI to their advantage to become more profitable. Often, there are many ways to approach a particular idea, or investment theme. 

You can explore Trade Ideas by Theme or Preset Screens. Let’s consider each one.

Explore Investment Themes

Themes lets you explore stocks based on macroeconomic themes and industry groupings. This section of the tool changes often as new themes become newsworthy and popular, so check back if you don’t see a particular theme of interest this week.

Explore Preset Screens

Preset Screens lets you explore stocks based on criteria that are regularly used by investors. Here are some examples of preset screens for stocks.

• Top performers: Stocks with the highest combined positive performance over 5 days, 52 weeks and year to date
• Top rated: Stocks with a bullish analyst rating based on key metrics such as valuation, growth, quality, momentum and income factors
• Top dividends: Stocks paying and growing their dividends for shareholders who seek cash income from their investments
• Upside momentum: Stocks hitting new levels while gaining bullish momentum 
• Bullish chart patterns: Stocks forming classic chart patterns with a calculated target price and target timeframe

Once you’ve spotted a stock group that’s of interest, you can further refine the list by sorting according to additional criteria. There are over 50 fundamental and quantitative criteria to choose from. For example, you could sort AI stocks by a technical factor, like high trading volume, combined with a fundamental factor, like a high earnings growth rate. 

After you select a stock list, you can see how it would have performed in the past by backtesting the past performance of that list against the historical data of a market benchmark. This feature provides a 5-year performance review, helping you gauge the potential success of your strategies before committing. These insights can significantly boost your confidence in your investment decisions.

As always, you should understand the limits of backtesting. Backtested data relies on historical performance, which may not accurately predict future results. Market conditions, economic factors and company-specific events can change and impact the effectiveness of a strategy.

Additionally, backtesting can sometimes lead to overfitting, where a strategy performs well on historical data but fails when you try to use it in the real world. For example, taxes and market liquidity are 2 elements that can affect performance but may not be accounted for in the backtest. You should use backtesting as one of many tools in your decision-making but supplement it with current market analysis and diversification.

Financial markets are always changing. In the future, different stocks may qualify to be on a list you’ve created, while other stocks may no longer qualify. You can save your stock lists and sign up for alerts to be automatically notified of any changes. This ensures you’ll always be up to date and informed of the latest developments so you can stay proactive and responsive to market conditions.