Alpha: the number
One score per name, 0 to 100. The market taken out; what is left, ranked.
The scale
Most of a stock's daily move is the market. Alpha subtracts it and scores what remains. 50 means nothing to see. Above 50 the name is building strength of its own; below 50 it is losing ground of its own. 80 is leadership across several horizons at once; 20 is the mirror image.
The words beside the number say the same thing, Bullish · Strong, Bearish · Weak. A name too close to 50 to lean either way reads Neutral. The engine does not manufacture opinions.
On the trade line Alpha is the entry and the exit. A long run is posted when Alpha rises through 60 and holds there two closes; it leaves when Alpha closes back under 60. A short is the mirror at 40. The number you see on the Today tab, "alpha now", is this score today.
What is inside it
Strength against the market and against the name's own sector, over several lookbacks. Whether its true peers agree. Whether the trend is healthy. Not every ingredient counts the same; the blend is the engine's.
Then the discounts. Volatility that is unusual for this name pulls the score toward 50. A fresh one-day shock is flagged but not allowed to move the score until it persists. A tape that opposes the name trims its edge. Alpha is the number after the discounts, the caution is already in it, so do not apply it twice.
The three dials
Edge, how far the name's strength picture sits from neutral. The raw material.
Conviction, how much the engine trusts that picture once volatility and noise are accounted for. High Edge with low Conviction is interesting and treacherous.
Behind Conviction sit ten checks, each answering yes or no: strength across several horizons against the market and the sector, peer breadth, trend, momentum, and a tenth for stability, the name's short-term behaviour. Steady counts as agreement. A shock that has persisted votes with the read if it runs the read's way and against it if not (the ⚡ badge marks that counter-trend case, because it is a warning). A shock that is fresh but not yet persistent abstains, so one wild day cannot swing the count. "9 of 10" is a chorus; "3 of 10" is one loud voice.
The chorus has been worth listening to. In our replays, runs the checks agreed on lasted about twice as long as runs they split on, in every tape. On the long side the agreed runs also beat the market by a clearly wider margin; on the short side that pattern has not held, so read bearish agreement as description, not endorsement. On the trade line this is the run clock: agreement says how long, not how much.
Sector rank, how much of its own sector the name is beating, turned to face the side of the call (for a short: how much of the sector is beating it). High always means the evidence agrees with the direction.
It is a rank, not a health check. 97 in a hot sector is a monster; 97 in a struggling sector is the best house on a rough street. The health check is two cards over, Sector tone. Rank 97 with tone 19% is not a contradiction; it is the full picture, leader of a weak group.
Sector rank 97 · Sector tone 19% → concentrated leadership: a fine long leg for a pair, and lonely if it cracks.
The footnote, decoded
First part: what the score has done today. Second: the market's mood, from Risk-On through Mixed to Risk-Off. When "headwind" or "tailwind" appears it is disclosure, not advice, the engine has already trimmed or credited this name for the tape.
The score strip, card by card
The desk strip, the sticky row under the header, keeps five facts in view on every tab: the session and last refresh, the tape, the market regime, Market α, and market tone. Market α is the whole market on the same 0–100 scale as every stock. Its chip carries a small range bar: the span is today's low-to-high of that score, the faint tick where it opened, the bright dot where it is now. Dot near the top means the market's strength built through the session; dot at the bottom after a high open means a day that gave it back. Every stock and sector ticket carries the same bar beside its Alpha, so a name's day reads the same way. The bar resets at each open; give it an hour before reading much into it.
Selected Alpha, the focused name's score, direction, and where it opened. The same number as the big one in the ticket, kept in view while you browse.
The price line follows broker convention: the day change is against the prior session's official close. After 16:00 ET the headline freezes at the closing print; any evening movement shows separately as a small AH figure, so after-hours drift never rewrites the day you traded.
Relative value, the extension read (Fair, Very Extended, Deep Discount…) against the name's own sector norms. A position, never a direction.
Tone, the share of names in a scope the engine calls Bullish. 50% is balanced; the word beside it says it plainly. With a stock selected the card shows its sector's tone against the market and universe tones. It is your opportunity-set gauge: 60% is a stock-picker's tape, 25% means longs are fighting the current.
Market regime, the tide, read from our breadth set: how many names are in uptrends and whether fresh highs outnumber fresh lows. The same regime that feeds every name's headwind or tailwind.
How to use it
Direction beats level. A name rising through 60 is a better entry than one sitting at 80: the move is being built, not already spent. That is why the trade line posts runs when they are fresh, two closes over the line, and not simply when the number is high. The same rise is worth more from Fair or a Discount than from Extended; strength that has not stretched yet has somewhere to go.
Level sets size. High Alpha with high Conviction earns a full line; high Alpha with a Turbulent volatility badge earns a smaller one. On the long side, agreement sharpens this, a split-signal long deserves a smaller position or a wait for more checks to line up. On the short side, size by risk, never by our certainty; the trade line already offers shorts at half size and only against the index.
Bleeding back toward 50 is the early exit. The score decays before the price chart confesses.
The exit that tested best for a long run: leave when Alpha closes back under 60. We made exits compete on identical fresh-run entries. In a trending tape the fixed 21-day hold earned the most in total, but the Alpha-under-60 exit kept most of that edge in less than half the time, with half the worst case, the best return per day held. In the 2022 grinding bear every fixed hold lost, worse the longer you held, and this exit cut the loss by two-thirds. Robust in both weathers, so it is the rule on every long line and the one the tracker flags. There is no payoff window to wait for on a run: the edge accrues while the run persists and stops when the score gives up 60.