Stocks & Commodities V. 29:1 (52-54) Product Review: Pristine Pattern Method Scan by Dennis D. Peterson

Stocks & Commodities V. 29:1 (52-54) Product Review: Pristine Pattern Method Scan by Dennis D. Peterson

The Pristine Pattern Method Scan plugin comes with screening filters, expert commentary, chart annotation, and templates to help find patterns that fit with the Pristine approach. The Pristine Method was covered in two earlier reviews in the February and April 2010 issues of Stocks & Commodities.

MetaStock refers to its screening filters as Explorations and its expert commentary and chart annotation as Expert Advisors. The CD comes with a 50-page manual that fits into the CD case. There are brief explanations of each of the pattern scans that you can use with the Explorer or Expert Advisor. There are 17 different explorations. Both courses are helpful, but the first course is more aligned with this plugin. Let’s look at an example.

Using the pattern scan called the “Bullish Changing of the Guard” resulted in about 16 tickers being selected (Figure 1) when I was scanning the Standard & Poor’s 500 on August 24, 2010. One of the columns in the Exploration report is “Setup,” which displays 1.000 or 0.000. The zero represents false and “1” represents true. The first row displays Anadarko Petroleum Co. (Apc).

“Bullish Changing of the Guard” is a phrase that Pristine uses to identify an up day bar following a three-bar pattern of lower highs or, in the case of candlesticks, three solid red bars. For MetaStock, implementation of candlesticks’ solid red bars versus red-outlined bars is an important qualification since MetaStock will outline a candlestick in red if its close is less than the previous day’s close, whether it’s an up day or down day. If it’s a down day, then the body of the candlestick is filled in, making it a solid red candlestick, but if it’s an up day, then the outline of the body is red but not filled in.

With 17 different scans or explorations available, you might ask, “Are they all independent?” and the answer would be yes. MetaStock allows you to pick a set of symbols such as the S&P 500, and using the control key, select all 17. This generates 17 independent reports. MetaStock also allows you to feed the results of one scan into another because it creates a file of the tickers from the most recent scan, and you can point the Exploration to the file of those tickers that came from a past scan. Feeding the results of one scan into another is done one exploration at a time.