As of 03/27/2024
  Indus: 39,760 +477.75 +1.2%  
  Trans: 16,029 +177.70 +1.1%  
  Utils: 875 +23.30 +2.7%  
  Nasdaq: 16,400 +83.82 +0.5%  
  S&P 500: 5,248 +44.91 +0.9%  
YTD
 +5.5%  
 +0.8%  
-0.8%  
 +9.2%  
 +10.0%  
  Targets    Overview: 03/13/2024  
  Up arrow40,000 or 38,500 by 04/01/2024
  Up arrow16,300 or 15,350 by 04/01/2024
  Up arrow885 or 830 by 04/01/2024
  Up arrow16,600 or 15,200 by 04/01/2024
  Up arrow5,350 or 5,100 by 04/01/2024
As of 03/27/2024
  Indus: 39,760 +477.75 +1.2%  
  Trans: 16,029 +177.70 +1.1%  
  Utils: 875 +23.30 +2.7%  
  Nasdaq: 16,400 +83.82 +0.5%  
  S&P 500: 5,248 +44.91 +0.9%  
YTD
 +5.5%  
 +0.8%  
-0.8%  
 +9.2%  
 +10.0%  
  Targets    Overview: 03/13/2024  
  Up arrow40,000 or 38,500 by 04/01/2024
  Up arrow16,300 or 15,350 by 04/01/2024
  Up arrow885 or 830 by 04/01/2024
  Up arrow16,600 or 15,200 by 04/01/2024
  Up arrow5,350 or 5,100 by 04/01/2024

Bulkowski on Best Buy Price for Stocks

What is the best buy price for stocks? Let's find out.

Best Buy Price: Summary

Stocks priced $5 or less have the highest average rise with the lowest failure rate of any range studied.

Stocks $20 or below have above average gains and lower failure rates than the higher priced stocks.

Best Buy Price: Methodology

I used 1,269 stocks going back as far as May 1988 and lasting to June 2015 but few stocks covered the entire range. I included bull and bear markets because taken individually didn't change the results and I wanted to keep the sample counts high.

Excluded were dividends, commissions, fees, and if the ultimate high was not found by the end of data, I just used the highest high. The ultimate high is the highest high before a 20% drop or before the stock closes below the bottom of the chart pattern (where it's assumed that a stop loss order would end the trade).

I used 22,940 chart patterns of 38 varieties in the analysis.

I measured the rise from the closing price the day before the breakout of a chart pattern to the ultimate high. Then I did a frequency distribution of the closing price the day before the breakout but mapped the associated rise to the ultimate high.

That's like digging into your pocket and pulling out your change. I counted the number of pennies, nickels, and dimes but instead of using the sum of the coins of each denomination (such as $5.50 worth of dimes, $2.25 worth of nickels), I counted how many coins of each denomination there were (55 dimes, 45 nickels).

This becomes clear when you look at the bar chart in the next section.

Survivorship bias: I included chart patterns from stocks that no longer trade for whatever reason (went bankrupt, merged out of existence, and so on).

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Best Buy Price: Results

Picture of a bar chart of the results.

The above chart shows a frequency distribution of gains sorted by the closing price the day before the breakout from almost 23,000 chart patterns.

The average rise of those chart patterns is 42%. I show that with a red line (location is approximate).

Notice that stocks priced up to $20 are above the red line (gains above average). After that, performance suffers.

The chart says that to boost your profit potential, select stocks $20 or below. Generally, the lower the price, the better the performance.

Top of page

Picture of a bar chart of failure rates.

This chart is the same as the previous one except that I added 5% and 10% failure rates.

The green vertical bars are the performance, taken from the prior chart as a reference.

The deep red bars represent trades that fail to see price rise at least 10% after the breakout. The lighter red bars are the 5% failure rate (a count of trades that fail to see price rise at least 5% after the breakout).

As the chart shows, the higher the breakout price, the larger the failure rate, up to about $65. After $65, the failure rates bobble up and down.

Again, for the best performance, buy lower priced stocks.

-- Thomas Bulkowski

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See Also

 

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