This is a program which calculates the ninety-nine day high signal, described by mungofitch over at The Motley Fool investment message boards.
The basic premise is that when the S&P stops making new highs, investors get pessimistic and stocks fall. When it starts making new highs again, optimism takes over and bull markets start. The ninety-nine day signal has 2 parts and coincidentally uses 99 days as the cut-off for both parts. It looks at whether a new high has been made recently. It defines "high" as a 99 day high. It defines "recently" as 99 days. So, it looks for a new 99-day high within the last 99 days. The number is arbitrary. Hop over to the Motley Fool boards to see how the dates have been tuned and pick different ones, if you like.
I like this one, because it's simple, easy to calculate and doesn't have many "signals", so you're not constantly buying and selling. It's, of course, not perfect, but it would have gotten you out of most of the major bear markets.
You need the ystockquote module from http://www.goldb.org/ystockquote.html
Download the ystockquote module. Install it in the same directory as the ninety-nine.py file (or somewhere on your python path). Then, run:
$ python ninety-nine.py
2010-06-07 1050.47 1219.8 1 16.1
2010-06-08 1062.00 1219.8 1 14.9
2010-06-09 1055.69 1219.8 1 15.5
2010-06-10 1086.84 1219.8 1 12.2
2010-06-11 1091.60 1219.8 1 11.7
Current signal: Buy
Data is stored in a file called 99.pkl so that only new data is downloaded each time you run the program.
Columns displayed are: 'Date', 'latest S&P level', '99 day high', 'Signal (1=buy)', '% needed to rise to get new high'
GPL