True strength: the relative strength chart
The line that ignores the market's mood.
What it is
Take the stock's move each day. Subtract what it should have moved given its beta and what the market did. Add up the leftovers, day after day. That running total is the line: the stock's true strength, relative strength done properly, with the market and beta taken out rather than a price ratio. (The textbook name is cumulative relative performance.)
You get it twice: against the market (SPY) and against the stock's own sector.
The mental shift
A rising line is not a rising price. A rising line means beating expectations.
The market carried it. The stock added nothing of its own.
That is the whole trick. Strip out the market's motion and what is left is the stock's own story: the thing Alpha scores and the trade line trades.
The chart, element by element
Green line, vs the market. Yellow line, vs the sector. Dotted blue, the price itself, for context.
Alpha bars (right axis, 0–100): the engine's verdict on all of it, day by day. 50 is no edge. The Alpha chip top-right colours itself: green above neutral, red below.
Status line (top-left): the phase in plain words, Accumulation or Distribution, how long the relative move has run and at what pace, and the extension read.
E under a bar, an earnings day. The line bends there; judge the slope after the gap, not through it.
The last bar tells the time. During the session it is live. After the close the solid bar is where the session settled; a faint bar with a blue stamp shows where extended hours have taken it since. Pre-market, the stamp alone marks the early tape.
Hover anywhere and every legend number re-reads for that date. Scrub back through a move to replay it.
The signal ribbons
▲ green run under the price: confirmed strength: the score is high and still building. These stretches are where long runs get posted.
▼ red run above the price: confirmed weakness: score low, relative performance still bleeding. Read it as avoid or underweight, in quality names weakness tends to snap back, which is why the trade line offers weak names only hedged against the index and at half size. When a flagged name is already deeply discounted, the ticket relabels it bounce risk.
◆ yellow, the hand-off: one state has ended, the next is not confirmed. Expect chop; size accordingly.
Runs, not one-offs. A signal must persist before it prints, and it keeps printing while conditions hold. No marks at all means no edge either way, that is information too.
Your trade on the chart
Track a name and the chart keeps your score. From the day you tracked it the background carries the verdict, green while the call is paying, red while it is losing, amber while it is sideways within a point or two, signed by your thesis, so a short that fell reads green. A dashed marker sits on your entry day with a tracked tag; when the tested exit fires, a red dashed marker shows the exact day it first did. Click either tag to jump to that trade in the tracker.
Compare mode and the spread lane
Type any covered ticker into + compare and its own vs-market line drops in as solid purple, in the same market-adjusted frame, with its price as dotted purple, dotted always means price, the colour says whose. The vs-sector line steps aside while you compare and returns when you clear the box. With a second name in the box a Pairs ▸ button appears beside it and hands the two names to the Pairs tab, where they are read as a pair (each leg against the market, both Alphas, the spread, the reads); without a compare name there is no button, because there is no pair yet.
A histogram appears underneath: the pair spread, your stock minus the compare, in percentage points, the subject of the Hedge pairs chapter. The lane grades the pairing too. net β is the pair's leftover market exposure per $1 long at the shown sizing: near zero (green) the pair is a pure relative bet; away from zero (amber, then red) the "hedge" still leans long or short the whole market, and a broad move drags your P&L whoever is winning the spread. The equal-risk sizing ($1 : $0.82) equalises daily movement, not market exposure: which is why net β is worth a glance. The number is usable as it stands: net β × your long-side dollars is the hidden market position you carry. At −0.29 with $2,600 long you are short about $750 of SPY on the side. Leave it on if it points the way you think the tape is going; cancel it with that many dollars of SPY the other way if you want the spread pure. Small leans are usually cheaper to accept than to trade away. Then the verdict: ✓ hedgeable when the names move together enough to trade as one spread; ✗ weak pair when you would just be holding two separate bets.
A red net β is a quality caution, not a hedging to-do. In our replays, pairs entered with a large lean were the strongest cohort over the first two weeks and the weakest by a month, with the heaviest tails of any group. A big lean usually means one leg's beta has collapsed or exploded: the pair is lopsided and its payoff is front-loaded. Cancelling the lean with a third leg did not fix that. The tested read is simpler: on a red chip, prefer the front of the payoff window and let the Narrowing rule take you out early rather than late.
How to use it
Buy strength that is building, the line rising, and still rising. Leadership persists; accumulation takes weeks, not hours.
Reduce when it rolls over. Do not wait for the price chart to agree; relative weakness is the early warning, not the aftermath.
Both lines rising: vs market and vs sector, is clean leadership. Rising vs sector only is a sector story wearing the stock's clothes.