Yes, the 200 SMA was broken on the $SPY today and yes, the markets look ugly right now. This isn’t the time to take the day/week/month off. Instead, the proactive market participant is busy looking for market themes and common threads that exist amongst the thousands of tickers out there. As an example, here’s a list (I haven’t personally looked at the names with a technical eye) of stocks that have been out performing the S&P 500 over the last 90 days. I’ve filtered out some data so these names should be trading above $ 5 and have an average daily volume (over the past 90 days) above 500,000.

I’m not suggesting that these names should be bought, or even traded for that matter. What I am suggesting is that just because there’s no horse in the race doesn’t mean that we should avoid going to the track (cheesy, I know). At times like this, doing research allows objectivity to be a key factor in finding candidates. This scan is just one of thousands that could be parsed through so that when the markets stabilize the proactive trader is ready to participate.

Click on any of the tickers below and be taken to the Stoctwits page and see what others have to say about the name. Search for fundamentals from the same page by clicking on the ycharts link at the top of the page.  Go to Google finance (link via stocktwits page) and look at the competitors. If you treat trading as a career and not just a job or a slot machine then you know there’s work to be done.

$AKAM
$ANN
$APKT
$ARQL
$BIDU
$BYD
$CKR
$CLDX
$CPE
$CRUS
$CSTR
$DCTH
$DDS
$DTG
$FCH
$GRT
$HOV
$IPXL
$ISSI
$LCAPA
$LF
$ME
$MSPD
$NFLX
$OCLRD
$PACR
$PEI
$PRGO
$PWER
$QCOR
$RT
$SFI
$SOMX
$THOR
$VCI
$VHC
$WAL
$WNC