[malaguti]

Hi all,
  I finished reading Weinstein's book last month and had a question regarding identifying sectors or groups of stocks that are performing well for longs or performing poorly for shorting.  What time span do you all use when identifying whether a sector/group is up or down?  My trades are normally open anywhere from 1 week to several months.  I typically swing trade on pullbacks.  I have been use the 5-Day, 1 Month, and 3 Month time spans to check performance on stock sectors.  At times, a sector may be up on the 5-Day time frame, but down on the other two and vice versa.  What is your criteria or strategy for determining if a sector or group is up or down relative to your strategy?

I've tried many different ways personally to determine this, but I settled on identifying the strongest sectors via my daily watchlist scans. As because the scans are based on volume, I can see where the money is flowing into the stocks which are breaking out and meet our other key criteria for the method, and so when I see multiple stocks from the same sector coming up in my scans day after day, then I know that that is the sector in which I want to be focusing on. i.e. the recent example of this would be gold and silver stocks, which have been in my scans regularly for over half of the year now. And if you follow other people that use stage analysis you'll have seen the same sector being mentioned over and over again in their posts.

interesting discussion. i'll give my 2cents. 
i've been backtesting this concept and my calculation is based on the same criteria that weinstein uses for the relative strength of the stock to the sector which is the 52week average of the mansfield relative strength
when i use the 52 week average of the sector to the index, to find the strongest relative strength of the sector, i am getting really great backtest results.
so my calcualtion, which is done weekly as per the investor method, i just use the exact same calculation as stan does for the stock