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Beginners in Stock Trading
Issue №69 · ~7 min read
Weekend Recap: Week 10 (M3 W1)
The tenth Saturday of the year. With this recap, the S, supply and demand, is fully covered. Four of the seven CAN SLIM letters are now in your toolkit. Monday opens the L.
A NOTE ON WHERE WE ARE
Real talk on delivery: this week, Monday through Friday, never went out as evening sends. You're getting all five days here, at once, instead of spread across the week. Same gap that's hit a few weeks this summer, now landing on the S deep-dive.
Practical milestone: as of this week, the four-letter combined screen (C + A + N + S) typically narrows the U.S. equity universe down to 5-20 high-quality candidates per quarter. That's already a focused, workable watchlist, small enough to monitor closely, large enough to give you real choices across a quarter. Three letters remain (L, I, M), all still ahead in M3.
THE WEEK IN ONE PARAGRAPH
None of this reached you Monday through Friday. Here it is in full, day by day:
Monday, why float size changes everything. The float is total shares outstanding minus restricted insider holdings, the actual tradeable supply. Stocks split into four float-size categories: mega (over 1 billion shares, think Apple or Nvidia), large (200 million to 1 billion), mid (50-200 million), and small (under 50 million). The mechanic is simple supply-curve math: 3 million shares of institutional buying is 10% of a 30-million-share float but only 0.3% of a 1-billion-share float, so the same dollar of buying moves a small float far more. That cuts both ways, small floats also gap down harder on bad news (an 8% stop can fill at 15% below entry if the gap is wide enough), and can be hard to exit at size if a fund tries to sell into thin daily volume. The practical rule: prefer mid-float names for primary positions, treat small-float names as smaller, higher-conviction allocations.
Tuesday, Trader Tuesday: William O'Neil's fifth and, for now, final feature. The angle this time was where the S itself came from: O'Neil's tabulation of the great winners found the same volume signature over and over, above-average volume on the breakout day, clustered accumulation days beforehand, declining volume through the base's consolidation, and smaller floats in many of the biggest winners. The 25%-above-average accumulation-day threshold and the 40-50%-above-average breakout threshold both came from that empirical work, not theory. The deeper point: volume is proof in a way price alone isn't, a light-volume rally reflects a few participants and reverses easily, a heavy-volume rally reflects committed capital and tends to extend. Same logic on the downside.
Wednesday, buybacks: supply shrinks, price tends to follow. A company buying back 5% of its shares shrinks the float by that much and mechanically lifts EPS by slightly more than 5% (smaller denominator, same or growing net income), pressure that has nothing to do with the operating business improving. Three types: open-market (gradual, flexible, moderate signal), accelerated share repurchases (a single large transaction, stronger signal of conviction), and tender offers (a premium price, the strongest signal). The real diagnostic isn't the type, it's confidence versus engineering: buybacks funded from real free cash flow with stable or falling debt are the high-quality kind; buybacks funded by taking on debt, propping up EPS while leverage quietly rises, are the kind that unwind badly later.
Thursday, the 25-day count that does most of the work. Tally accumulation days (close up, volume 25%+ above the 50-day average) and distribution days (close down, same volume threshold) over the trailing 25 trading days, about 90-120 seconds per stock once you've practiced. Five buckets result: strong accumulation (5+ up, 0-1 down) down to strong distribution (0-1 up, 5+ down), with modest accumulation, neutral, and modest distribution in between. Whether the heavy days cluster together (a specific catalyst, often an earnings reaction) or scatter evenly (steady, independent institutional buying) adds a second read on top of the raw count. The same 25-day count run on the S&P 500 itself is the market-level version, the seed of the M letter still to come.
Friday, the S in one checklist. Five points: the 25-day accumulation/distribution count, float characteristics, insider transaction trend, share-count trend, and breakout volume signature when applicable. Stack that on the existing 8-point C and 6-point A checklists and you've got a 19-point combined fundamental-and-supply-demand screen, plus the N's catalyst-driven new-high check on top. Running the full C+A+N+S combination typically narrows the universe to 5-20 stocks a quarter, down from the 10-40 that clear C+A+N alone, because a real chunk of fundamentally-strong stocks simply don't have institutional money flowing into them yet.
THE ONE THING TO HOLD FROM THIS WEEK
If you remember nothing else: the supply-demand layer either confirms or contradicts the fundamental story, and the contradiction is the leading indicator.
A stock with strong C, A, N and strong S (real accumulation, favorable float, shrinking share count) is the canonical setup, both stories agree, and these tend to advance. A stock with strong fundamentals but weak S, no visible accumulation, a distribution-day cluster, an unfavorable supply structure, is suspect: the numbers are real, but something (sector out of favor, credibility questions, a structural issue the headline fundamentals don't show) is keeping institutional money on the sidelines, and that absence is often the earlier warning. The reverse, strong S without strong fundamentals, is just as suspect: the buying may be early on a story that hasn't shown up in the numbers yet, or it may reverse fast the moment an earnings report disappoints.
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NEXT WEEK PREVIEW
Monday opens M3 W2, the L, Leader vs Laggard, O'Neil's own "hardest letter" because it requires comparing a stock to its peers and the broader market rather than measuring it in isolation. Tuesday is Trader Tuesday: David Ryan, his fourth feature, on relative strength as the single most actionable input inside the L. The rest of the week covers RS-rating mechanics, a first Tier 2 named-trader feature (Joe Fahmy), the bench-the-laggards rule, and industry-group rotation.
ONE QUESTION THIS WEEK RAISES + ONE WEEKEND HABIT
A question this week's content raises immediately:
Q: "If a stock passes all five S-points but only modestly, everything yellow rather than a clean green pass, is that a real signal or just a marginal case?"
A modest signal, better than a mixed pass with real fails, but weaker than a clean sweep. The practical response is a smaller position and tighter risk parameters than you'd use on a fully-green pass, not a skip. When you have to choose between an all-yellow S-pass and a fully-green one at otherwise equal fundamentals, take the green every time.
The weekend habit: take two stocks, one that clears all four letters checked so far (C, A, N, S) and one that clears three of the four. Pull up both charts at the same time frame and scale. Notice what actually looks different, the volume signature is usually the most visible single distinction, and seeing it side by side makes the screen mechanics feel a lot less abstract.
TOMORROW, PATTERN OF THE WEEK #10
Tomorrow is Pattern of the Week #10, the first Pullback pattern of the year. The first nine PoWs covered the four foundational base patterns plus the first VCP; the pullback is shorter and faster-forming than any of those, a different mechanic worth learning on its own terms. Sunday's introduction is conceptual, the full deep-dive comes later in the year.
Reply with one thing
Take any stock from your watchlist and run the 25-day rolling accumulation/distribution count from Thursday's lesson. Reply with the ticker and the count (for example, "5 accumulation, 1 distribution"), and whether the pattern looked clustered or scattered if you can tell. We'll feature real replies once they start coming in.
— Beginners in Stock Trading
Educational content only. Not financial advice. Past performance does not predict future results.
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