How to systematically find sideways stocks?
You can likely use bollinger band values to programmatically recognize sideways trending stocks. Bollinger band averages expand during periods of volatility and then converge on the matched prices the longer there is little volatility in the asset prices. Also, look at the bollinger band formula to see if you can glean how that indicator does it, so that you can create something more custom fit to your idea.
"I (and probably most considering trading) had a similar thought as you.  I thought if I just skimmed the peaks and sold before the troughs, perhaps aided by computer, I'd be able to make a 2% here, 2% there, and that would add up quickly to a nice amount of money.  It almost did seem ""foolproof"". Then I realized that sometimes a stock just slides...down...and there is no peak higher than what I bought it for.  ""That's OK,"" I'd think, ""I'm sure it will recover and surpass the price I bought it for...so now I play the waiting game.""  But then it continues sliding, and my $10k is now worth $7k.  Do I sell?  Did I build a stop loss point into my computer program?  If so, what is the right place to put that stop?  What if there is a freak dip down and it triggers the stop loss but THEN my stock recovers?  I just lost $14,000 like this last week--luckily, only virtually! The point is, your idea only has half a chance to work when there is a mildly volatile stock that stays around some stable baseline, and even then it is not easy.  And then you factor in fees as others mentioned... People do make money doing this (day traders), and some claim you can use technical analysis to time orders well, so if you want to try that, read about technical analysis on this site or elsewhere." "My answer is Microsoft Excel.  Google ""VBA for dummies"" (seriously) and find out if your brokerage offers an 'API'.  With a brief understanding of coding you can get a spreadsheet that is live connected to your brokers data stream.  Say you have a spreadsheet with the 1990 value of each in the first two columns (cells a1 and b1).  Maybe this formula could be the third column, it'll tell you how much to buy or sell to rebalance them.   then to iterate the rebalance, set both a2 and b2 to =C1 and drag the formula through row 25, one row for each year.  It'll probably be a little more work than that, but you get the idea." "I think what you really want to look into is put options. You can essentially replicate the same thing, without worrying about margin calls. Check out this site http://www.fundamentalfinance.com/options/options-basic-charts.php a quick glance seems to show it to be pretty good.  The way you would limit downside risk is to buy a put option, allowing you to sell anytime within the next n months for the current price (assuming american). This will allow you to limit downside risk, however, potential profits do go down due to fees as another answer suggests this could be cost prohibitive. This type of strategy is also known as a ""protective put"". http://www.optionseducation.org/strategies_advanced_concepts/strategies/protective_put.html If you wanted to be more refined you could use Ak's bands, although you have to be looking for that specific outcome. Also due to complexity, this can become a taxing (in terms of time invested) and risky (if you are wrong) investment. Either way I think you need to study payoff curves a little more." Best of luck!  Just an FYI, a great deal of finance firms look for people like you.  The way you perceive things is completely different from the way someone who is traditionally trained in finance.  Look into some peers of DE.  Also, Private Equity (PE) firms...mainly the ones dealing with bio/pharma/whatever you specialize in.  What are your excel skills like?  Make them better!  No mouse.  Know VLOOKUP, GETPIVOTDATA, etc.  Again, not to become redundant, but figure out what you want to do and go from there...  If you are good/quick with your math look for trading.  There are a lot of books out there on the subject of trading.  Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis, will give you an insight to the lifestyle/mantra of traders (during the 80s).  If you like digging into numbers/investigating things you may want to look into a more analytical role.  To figure out if you like this read some financial statements.  Look on SEC.gov, navigate to EDGAR.  Look up a 10-k (annual report) and a 10-q (quarterly report).  See if you like poking around/figuring out why and how things work.  Hit up seekingalpha.com.  This is a hodgepodge of people's opinion.  Saying why they want to buy/sell a security.  Look at the reasons.  They will cite certain economic indicators or other signals.  Seekingalpha is a place that can show you how financial types think.  See how your views differ or align.  Or even if you can expand on what they are saying.  Investopedia is a great place to learn jargon and other terms.  Frequent this place.  Key terms: http://www.financialmodelingguide.com/financial-modeling-tips/tips/banking-financial-terms/  This gives short definitions.  Investopedia will give you in depth definitions.  Are you currently employed as a RandomAcademicDean?  Does your college offer free courses to staff?  If yes, take some classes FOR FREE!  Take an accounting course (skip managerial, stick with financial), an econ course, a finance course.  I am going to assume your college offers a class in Econometrics.  Talk to one of the professors, if you think this class would be manageable, sign up.  They will probably say your should take MACRO and MICRO.  This is true, but you have a P.h.D in Chemistry so you have a demonstrated aptitude towards academia.  Econometrics, in short, can be considered the science of business.  Bottom line:  Figure our your interest within the financial realm, act upon it.  Play up your knowledge in chemistry (as a quantitative science) and experience as a dean (think management role).  tl;dr soak up knowledge.  regurgitate when necessary. P.h.D = good. read a lot.  Finance is a big world, you will fit in! Hey, I suggest you check this place out: http://www.investopedia.com/university/  You can start from there and then read through the things you don't know about and move on from there. When using youtube, search for specific things rather than a general/broad search. For example here's a good youtube video relating to Candlestick Breakout Patterns: https://youtu.be/1fB3EF7XeXU "You can certainly try to do this, but it's risky and very expensive. Consider a simplified example. You buy 1000 shares of ABC at $1.00 each, with the intention of selling them all when the price reaches $1.01. Rinse and repeat, right? You might think the example above will net you a tidy $10 profit. But you have to factor in trade commissions. Most brokerages are going to charge you per trade. Fidelity for example, want $4.95 per trade; that's for both the buying and the selling. So your 1000 shares actually cost you $1004.95, and then when you sell them for $1.01 each, they take their $4.95 fee again, leaving you with a measly $1.10 in profit. Meanwhile, your entire $1000 stake was at risk of never making ANY profit - you may have been unlucky enough to buy at the stock's peak price before a slow (or even fast) decline towards eventual bankruptcy.  The other problem with this is that you need a stock that is both stable and volatile at the same time. You need the volatility to ensure the price keeps swinging between your buy and sell thresholds, over and over again. You need stability to ensure it doesn't move well away from those thresholds altogether. If it doesn't have this weird stable-volatility thing, then you are shooting yourself in the foot by not holding the stock for longer: why sell for $1.01 if it goes up to $1.10 ten minutes later? Why buy for $1.00 when it keeps dropping to $0.95 ten minutes later? Your strategy means you are always taking the smallest possible profit, for the same amount of risk. Another method might be to only trade each stock once, and hope that you never pick a loser. Perhaps look for something that has been steadily climbing in price, buy, make your tiny profit, then move on to the next company. However you still have the risk of buying something at it's peak price and being in for an awfully long wait before you can cash out (if ever). And if all that wasn't enough to put you off, brokerages have special rules for ""frequent traders"" that just make it all the more complicated. Not worth the hassle IMO." As an easy way to answer... look at an index, let's say the S&P 500.  Look at the price this last October, and predict where it will move in November... easy right?  It already happened, and you have the benefit of hindsight.  The move looks like such a consistent, obvious continuation of the previous up and down pattern.  It looks predictable, like you could have guessed that.  Now, look at today's price, and predict where it will go next month.  Not so easy now?  The problem is, every point you're at, all the time, looks like a possible inflection point or turning point.  If you're following an uptrend, you may think it'll continue, but you may also think that it zigged so far up already, that now it's ready for a zag down where you'll buy.  So you wait... and it keeps rising, and you kick yourself for missing out.  Next time, you see another uptrend and resolve to buy it regardless, thinking now it'll keep going, but it turns down the second you buy it, and keeps dropping.  You kick yourself again.  The market is amazing at doing this to you every time.  In real time, every wiggle in the price looks simultaneously like a trend that could continue, and like a trend that has moved far enough and is ready to reverse.  And more likely you'll guess the wrong one.   The ONLY way with some little hope of succeeding is to study study study, and find and learn trading rules with just over 50/50 chances (like buying when a moving average is touched within an uptrend as an example, and setting a stop loss at -1%, and a sell limit at +2% or something), and then never ever deviate from that strategy, because your only hope is in the consistency of statistics and odds over time.  You'll get many -1% losses, and hopefully enough 2% gains to compensate the losses, plus some profit.   OR, to make it easier, just buy in on a dip, and hold and hold and collect dividends, and be content to match the market without effort. Start by going onto google.com/finance and click through every publicly traded Fortune 500 company. Click on all their charts and look through their graphs for any patters. There will almost always be a pattern even if it is vague and fairly unpredictable. Then look for any jumps or drops in price. Look for the reason of the jump or drop. It could range commonly from news, lay off announcements, acquisitions, etc or just moving along with the market direction for the day. Looking at each stock is key because every stock has its own pattern. Trying to understand the market at a whole is quite impossible, but when you narrow it down to just one stock, it is much more doable. For practice, try updown.com(spent most of my time on it during high school) and create 10-100 accounts and use various techniques for each portfolio.   Just from that, you will have much more practice than the majority of traders. It is all very time consuming, but if you truly try on it, you will do better. I have to go(large market drop today, good time to buy).  I'll answer more questions later! I  found that  an application already exists which does virtually everything I want to do with a reasonable interface.  Its called My Personal Index.  It has allowed me  to look at my asset allocation all in one place. I'll have to enter: The features which solve my problems above include:  Note - This is related to an earlier post I made regarding dollar cost averaging and determining rate of returns.   (I finally got off my duff and did something about it) Reuters has a service you can subscribe to that will give you lots of Financial information that is not readily available in common feeds.  One of the things you can find is the listing/delist dates of stocks.  There are tools to build custom reports.  That would be a report you could write.  You can probably get the data for free through their rss feeds and on their website, but the custom reports is a paid feature. FWIW re-listing(listings that have been delisted but return to a status that they can be listed again) is pretty rare.  And I can not think of too many(any actually) penny stocks that have grown to be listed on a major exchange. "I'd start with a Google search for ""best backtesting tools."" Does your online brokerage offer anything? You already understand that the data is the important part.  The good stuff isn't free. But yeah, if you have some money to spend you can get more than enough data to completely overwhelm you. :)" "Strategy would be my top factor.  While this may be implied, I do think it helps to have an idea of what is causing the buy and sell signals in speculating as I'd rather follow a strategy than try to figure things out completely from scratch that doesn't quite make sense to me. There are generally a couple of different schools of analysis that may be worth passing along: Fundamental Analysis:Fundamental analysis of a business involves analyzing its financial statements and health, its management and competitive advantages, and its competitors and markets. When applied to futures and forex, it focuses on the overall state of the economy, interest rates, production, earnings, and management. When analyzing a stock, futures contract, or currency using fundamental analysis there are two basic approaches one can use; bottom up analysis and top down analysis. The term is used to distinguish such analysis from other types of investment analysis, such as quantitative analysis and technical analysis. Technical Analysis:In finance, technical analysis is a security analysis methodology for forecasting the direction of prices through the study of past market data, primarily price and volume. Behavioral economics and quantitative analysis use many of the same tools of technical analysis, which, being an aspect of active management, stands in contradiction to much of modern portfolio theory. The efficacy of both technical and fundamental analysis is disputed by the efficient-market hypothesis which states that stock market prices are essentially unpredictable. There are tools like ""Stock Screeners"" that will let you filter based on various criteria to use each analysis in a mix.  There are various strategies one could use.  Wikipedia under Stock Speculator lists: ""Several different types of stock trading strategies or approaches exist including day trading, trend following, market making, scalping (trading), momentum trading, trading the news, and arbitrage.""  Thus, I'd advise research what approach are you wanting to use as the ""Make it up as we go along losing real money all the way"" wouldn't be my suggested approach. There is something to be said for there being numerous columnists and newsletter peddlers if you want other ideas but I would suggest having a strategy before putting one's toe in the water." For video games the S&amp;P home entertainment software index will probably work. For airlines there's the S&amp;P airlines index but that may not work well for private jets.  You should browse different S&amp;P indicies based on GICS classifications or any other indicies you may find and then download their returns for the past few years and run a regression analysis on excel. Find the correlation between the indicies and the stock you're looking at then select the index with the highest correlation. I use the following method. For each stock I hold long term, I have an individual table which records dates, purchases, sales, returns of cash, dividends, and way at the bottom, current value of the holding. Since I am not taking the income, and reinvesting across the portfolio, and XIRR won't take that into account, I build an additional column where I 'gross up' the future value up to today() of that dividend by the portfolio average yield at the date the dividend is received. The grossing up formula is divi*(1+portfolio average return%)^((today-dividend date-suitable delay to reinvest)/365.25) This is equivalent to a complex XMIRR computation but much simpler, and produces very accurate views of return.  The 'weighted combined' XIRR calculated across all holdings then agrees very nearly with the overall portfolio XIRR. I have done this for very along time.  TR1933 Yes, 1933 is my year of birth and still re investing divis! It depends how you do it.  If you roll it from your 401k directly to a Roth then you will have to pay the taxes.  The contributions to the 401k are tax deferred.  Meaning you do not owe taxes on the money until you collect it.  Roth contributions are post tax but the gains are not taxed so long as they are disbursed under acceptable conditions according to the regulations. If you roll it directly from the 401k to a regular tax deferred IRA you should be able to do that with out penalties or taxes.  You will still have to pay the taxes at disbursement. If you have the money disbursed to you directly then you will have to pay the penalties, fees, and taxes.  Your contributions to an IRA will then be subject to limitations based on the IRA.  It will literally be exactly like you are taking money from your pocket to invest in the IRA.   Your company should give you the option of a rollover check.  This check will be made out to you but it will not be able to be deposited in a regular account or cashed.  It will only be redeemable for deposit into a retirement account that meets the regulatory requirements of the 401k rollover criteria.  I believe the check I received a few years ago was only good for 60 days.  I recall that after 60 days that check was void and I would receive a standard disbursement and would be subject to fees and penalties.  I am not sure if that was the policy of T.Rowe Price or if that is part of the regulation.