Most of my examples show tricky features of our formula editor.  But you can make simple formulas, too.  Here’s one I was helping someone write last night.  When we were done the answer was “Wow, I could have done that!”  We’re here to help, but we’ve designed the tools to be easy to use.

The basic question:  What stocks are hot today?  The Float says how many shares are easily available.  Volume Today, of course, says how many shares have traded today.  If the latter is bigger than the former, that means there isn’t enough stock to go around.  Imagine it’s almost Christmas, the store has 500 Cabbage Patch Kids, and 1,000 parents are lined up outside waiting for them to open.

So, how do we make this custom formula?  Start on our formula editor page.  Hit the “Create New” button.

The heart of this formula is just division.  If the volume today is big, or the float is small, or some combination of the two, I want my indicator to be big.  So I asked for the volume today divided by the float.

How do I ask for the stock’s float and the stock’s volume today?  I use these all the time, but I don’t memorize them.  Click the filter codes link to get a cheat sheet.

I multiplied the result by 100 to make it a percentage.  If I left that off it would have been a ratio.  That choice is partly a matter of personal taste.  I picked percent because that works well with with the cone indicator.

I hit the “Save” button to ensure I had no errors.  Here’s what my screen looks like:

Now let’s test it.  I started with a new top list.  I used the search feature on the config window to find “flo”.

I sorted the list by our new custom formula.  I also added our custom formula and the normal Float field as columns.  (Today’s Volume was already a column.)  Voila!

The picture above shows what I saw after hours.  (My computer is set to Pacific Time.  The market closes at 1pm Pacific.)  The picture below shows the next day, about two hours after the open.  The market in general isn’t that crazy yet, but we already see MCUR standing out from the crowd.

One more little detail.  The “cones” don’t look like they do on the rest of the web site.  I’m running our most recent beta software, version 4.0.9.  This is an exciting new feature.  Look for a video coming soon.

So remember.  We give you a lot of good windows and formulas to help you trade the stock market.  But that’s only a starting place.  You can customize these tools to see what you want.  Ask us for help, or try it yourself!