HK/US/CN: What to Buy, Add, Trim or Exit Today — Using a Daily Signal Checklist

"Which stock should I actually act on today?" Quote apps give you prices and charts but never answer that directly. A signal checklist takes the buy, add, trim and exit rules you wrote yourself, runs them across your whole watchlist every day, and outputs one prioritized list of actions. It is a scanner that runs your rules for you, not a command that decides for you.

Key takeaways

• A signal checklist answers "which name should I move on today," not "where is the market going."
• Read it in a fixed order: exit > trim > add > buy > watch. Handle risk in positions you already hold before looking at new opportunities.
• Buy and add signals are confirmed on the completed daily bar, so they appear after the close and before the next open. Exit and trim signals also refresh intraday on delayed quotes.
• Every signal is scored at T+1, T+5 and T+10, but a dozen samples cannot tell you whether a rule works.
• Your follow rate (how many buy signals you actually acted on) is the first number that separates "the rules made money" from "you made money."

Why you need an action list

Screen time is limited; a watchlist often has dozens of names. Judging each one by hand is slow, and the stock that gapped up hardest tends to hijack your attention. Handing the rules to a program produces one list that is already sorted into buckets and ranked, instead of a pile of data you still have to interpret on the spot. Your job becomes executing and recording, not re-deciding.

For how to write the rules themselves, see turning your logic into buy rules. This article is about using the list.

Priority: why sells come first

The list has five buckets: exit, trim, add, buy, watch. Read them in exactly that order, for three plain reasons:

1. Exit and trim signals are about positions you already hold. Missing one means a loss keeps growing or a gain keeps evaporating. Missing a buy signal means, at worst, one trade you didn't take.
2. Cash freed by selling determines how much you can deploy into adds and buys today. Work out what you're selling before you decide what you can buy; the other way round ends in "I wanted to buy but had no cash."
3. When time is short, this order guarantees the things you can least afford to skip get done.

The 15-minute pre-market routine

Take US stocks as the example. Before the open (or after the previous close), open the list and walk it in this order:

• Minutes 1–3, exit bucket. For each name, check which rule fired (floating loss above 5%, close below the 20-day low, and so on). You are not re-asking "should I wait a bit longer"; the rule already answered that. Write down the sell orders you will place.
• Minutes 4–6, trim bucket. See whether the trigger was overheating (RSI above 80, say) or a pullback, and confirm how much to trim.
• Minutes 7–10, add and buy buckets. First work out today's available cash (existing cash plus what the exits above will free), then size each candidate using risk-per-trade position sizing. If cash is short, choose by signal strength or a ranking you set in advance. Don't buy a little of everything.
• Minutes 11–13, watch bucket. Look, don't act. Note which names are one condition away from triggering so you know what to keep an eye on.
• Minutes 14–15, record. Log both what you plan to execute and what you decided to skip in your trading journal, especially the reason for skipping.

During the session you do exactly one thing: execute the orders you wrote before the open. No new decisions.

When signals are computed

Knowing the timing avoids the classic confusion of "why wasn't there a signal yesterday, and why did I only see it at the open?"

• Every indicator (moving averages, ADX, volume ratios and so on) is computed on completed daily bars, using end-of-day data from Yahoo Finance and Tencent.
• Buy and add signals are confirmed on the closed bar. A bar that hasn't finished can still change, so a buy signal never flickers on and off during the session. It appears in the window between the close and the next open, which is exactly why the pre-market routine exists.
• Exit and trim signals update at the daily close and also refresh intraday. Intraday quotes are delayed 15–20 minutes, so their job is to tell you "this position is at or near its exit condition," not to act as a to-the-minute stop. Your actual stop order belongs at your broker.

One stock, "buy" in one strategy and "exit" in another

If you run two strategies at once, the same stock can sit in the buy bucket of one and the exit bucket of the other on the same day. That is not a bug; the two rule sets are looking at different things. A trend strategy sees a 20-day breakout with rising ADX and says buy. A mean-reversion strategy sees RSI above 75 and six straight up days and says trim or exit. Both rules are correct on their own terms.

The fix is bookkeeping: assign each position to exactly one strategy, and let that strategy's rules govern its entry and exit. The other strategy's signal for that stock is information, not an instruction. Never buy on strategy A's signal and sell on strategy B's; you'll end up unable to review either one.

After the signal: T+1/T+5/T+10 scores and follow rate

Once a signal fires, the app records the close on the signal day and the closes 1, 5 and 10 trading days later, as a percentage change from the signal price. This scores the rule, not you.

Here is an example you can follow with a calculator. A strategy fires a buy signal at Monday's close, signal price 50.00:

On its own this one looks good at T+10. Now suppose the strategy has fired 9 buy signals over the past two months, averaging +1.8% at T+10, with 5 of the 9 positive. Sounds fine, but if the 10th signal comes in at −8%, the average becomes (9 × 1.8 − 8) ÷ 10 = +0.82%, more than halved by a single trade. With fewer than a few dozen samples, the score can tell you the rule is roughly doing what you intended; it cannot tell you the rule makes money over time. For that, run a backtest over a longer history.

Follow rate is a different number: of those 9 buy signals, how many did you actually place? If the answer is 3, your follow rate is 33%. Read it next to your real P&L. A common pattern is that the signal score is positive while your account is down, because you hand-picked the 3 that "looked right" and those happened to be the losers. What needs fixing then is execution, not the rule. A follow rate that stays under 50% usually means the rule doesn't match your real risk tolerance; change the rule rather than keep skipping it. More on this in a stop-loss you can't execute isn't a stop-loss.

How to set this up in Stock Compass

Here is a simple trend-following strategy with rules in all four buckets:

{
  "name": "20-day breakout trend",
  "market": "us",
  "rules": {
    "buy":  { "v": 2, "outerOp": "OR", "groups": [ { "innerOp": "AND", "conditions": [ { "indicator": "is_20d_breakout", "operator": "==", "value": 1 }, { "indicator": "adx_14", "operator": ">", "value": 25 }, { "indicator": "vol_vs_avg20d", "operator": ">", "value": 1.5 } ] } ] },
    "add":  { "v": 2, "outerOp": "OR", "groups": [ { "innerOp": "AND", "conditions": [ { "indicator": "floating_gain_pct", "operator": ">", "value": 8 }, { "indicator": "ma5_above_ma20", "operator": "==", "value": 1 } ] } ] },
    "trim": { "v": 2, "outerOp": "OR", "groups": [ { "innerOp": "AND", "conditions": [ { "indicator": "rsi", "operator": ">", "value": 80 } ] } ] },
    "exit": { "v": 2, "outerOp": "OR", "groups": [ { "innerOp": "AND", "conditions": [ { "indicator": "floating_loss_pct", "operator": ">", "value": 5 } ] }, { "innerOp": "AND", "conditions": [ { "indicator": "is_20d_breakdown", "operator": "==", "value": 1 } ] } ] }
  }
}

• buy: is_20d_breakout == 1 — today's close is a new 20-day high.
• buy: adx_14 > 25 — ADX above 25 indicates a trending market rather than a sideways false breakout.
• buy: vol_vs_avg20d > 1.5 — today's volume is at least 1.5 times the 20-day average, so the breakout has participation.
• add: floating_gain_pct > 8 and ma5_above_ma20 == 1 — only add when the position is already up 8% and the 5-day MA is still above the 20-day MA.
• trim: rsi > 80 — overheated; take some off.
• exit: floating_loss_pct > 5 or is_20d_breakdown == 1 — a floating loss above 5%, or a close below the 20-day low; either one exits (the two groups are joined by OR).

Once saved, the rules run against your watchlist every day and the results land in the exit, trim, add, buy and watch buckets. The numbers are illustrative; set yours from your own backtests.

Common mistakes

• Starting with the buy bucket. The most tempting bucket is last on purpose.
• Chasing a buy signal you see mid-session. Buy signals are confirmed at the close and don't appear fresh intraday; what you're seeing is last night's signal, and the price is no longer the signal price.
• Treating a 10-sample T+10 average as the strategy's win rate. One outlier rewrites the conclusion.
• Letting two strategies fight. Buy on A's signal, sell on B's, and neither can be reviewed afterwards.
• Logging only the trades you took. Without the skipped ones there is no follow rate, and you can't tell whether losses come from the rule or from you.

Summary

Quote tools answer "how did the market move." A signal checklist answers "which name should I move on today." A fixed reading order (sells before buys), fixed timing (confirmed at the close, handled pre-market) and fixed review numbers (T+N scores and follow rate) are what let your rules actually do the work. Whether you press the button stays your call.