Subject: Re: Finding Screen Overlaps with GTR1
Do you ever eliminate any stocks for non-mechanical reasons? Like WBD is based on a buyout so if it were trading near $31 would you eliminate it?

Every time that thought crosses my mind, I steel myself to remember some quotes
"Discretion over buy-and-sell decisions in aggregate can turn a model that generates a market beating return into a sub-par return. IOW, follow the signals religiously!"

and
"(In a proven investment trading strategy...)
Do not -- repeat DO NOT -- pay much attention to the effect of every trade. The majority of individual trades will be irrelevant to your long-term results.

You should be concerned about portfolio results, not position results.

You need to trade like a casino – probability based, with no particular outcome required of any one trade.
1. Anything can happen
2. You don’t need to know what’s going to happen next in order to make money.
3. Wins and losses are random – You will never know when a trade will be a winner in advance, only that the conditions that define your edge are present.
4. Your edge is nothing more than a higher probability of one thing happening over another. Your edge is no guarantee of a winning trade, just of winning over time.
-- http://www.roguetraderette.com..."

and
"The historical evidence is clear that the winning strategy in both stocks and bonds is to ignore all forecasts and stick to a well-developed plan. -- Larry Swedroe"

So, yeah, no.
I held onto WBD until it dropped off the screen. In a moment of weakness, early on I set a GTC sell at 30.99 just in case it got there.

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For the sake of completeness I will say that I changed the way to pick overlaps. It is trickier than it appears at first blush. Thinking about it overnight I was unhappy about the way I was doing it. Remember, this is all in a bash script -- so no handwaving allowed. It was a bit of a challenge to get it working right, especially making sure that some stocks were not included twice in the final overlap picks. And then to get the non-common stocks in the "proper" order. Trick here is to settle on what you think is the proper order.

So my current method is:
* The stocks that are common in the top 3 of both screens (PHL and RS).
* The stocks that haven't been picked that are in the top 6 of both screens.
* The remaining stocks that haven't been picked, alternately from each screen, in rank order.
* Invest in the top N stocks. My current thinking is N=7.
* The source lists are top 12-15 of each screen, in rank order, irrespective of how many stocks that screen invests in.

My convenient data source for the RS screen data gives the top 20, which is plenty.