What Sensifty is
A watchlist that knows each stock’s own habits. It tells you when a stock is unusually stretched compared with its own past, and when it has come back down. That is all it tries to do.
The idea in a minute
Most tools hold every stock to the same yardstick: RSI above 70 is “overbought”, full stop. But a fast-growing small company and a steady large one do not behave alike. What is normal for one is extreme for the other.
Sensifty measures each stock against its own history instead. When it says a stock is stretched, it means stretched for that stock. And when a stretched stock comes back down, it tells you once, so you can take a fresh look at a calmer price.
What you see for each stock
A stretch score from 0 to 100. It combines a handful of standard measures, the kind every charting site shows: distance from moving averages, RSI and Bollinger bands. Each is ranked against the stock’s own last few years before they are combined.
| Score | How to read it |
|---|---|
| Below 20 | Washed out |
| 20 to 40 | Cooled off |
| 40 to 70 | Neutral |
| 70 to 85 | Stretched |
| 85 and above | Very stretched |
The trend. Whether the price is above or below its long-term average, and which way that average is heading. A downtrend has to hold for a few sessions before it counts, so one bad week does not flip it.
Three levels below the price, L1 to L3. Prices where several well-known reference points agree: moving averages, earlier lows, old highs the price has broken through, and prices where a lot of shares changed hands. Next to each one you see how often this stock came down to it in the past.
Its own record. When the stock last came back down from a stretch, and what its price did over the following months.
The alert
A stock on your watchlist is armed once its score reaches 70. You get one notification when it comes back down to L1, or when its score drops below 40, whichever happens first. Then it stays quiet until that stock is stretched again. For a typical stock that means two or three alerts a year.
Is any of this new?
No, and it is not meant to be. Moving averages, RSI and support levels have been around for decades and are in every charting tool. Sensifty did not invent the moving average. It just puts it to work properly.
What Sensifty adds is the organising: measuring those familiar tools against each stock’s own past, combining them into one score and three levels you can read at a glance, checking your list every evening, and staying quiet until something has changed. The exact combination and settings are its own, and stay that way.
Two ways to look at a stock
Long-term looks at the bigger picture over several years. Positional looks at the last couple of years and shorter swings. Each stock on your watchlist keeps the view you chose for it.
Where the prices come from
End-of-day prices for NSE and BSE stocks are published to the Sensifty data service every trading evening, and the extension picks them up after 5 pm. Pro adds live prices during market hours. All prices come from established third-party data providers. They are adjusted for splits and bonuses, so a bonus issue does not look like a crash.
What testing showed
Before selling anything, the rules were replayed on daily prices for 49 NIFTY-50 stocks from 2005 to 2021, with a decision every month for each stock, 7,253 in all. Each time, the same money was invested several ways and compared with investing all of it that day.
- Waiting for the score to cool, or spreading purchases across the levels, changed one-year returns by about one percentage point either way compared with buying at once.
- When a stock was stretched, waiting came out ahead in about 60% of cases, but lost slightly on average, because the times the stock kept running cost more than the dips saved.
- Once the price reached a level, it bounced before breaking about 70% of the time. Arbitrary prices at the same depth did about the same. The levels are useful reference points, not support you can count on.
- The alert fired a median of 2.7 times per stock per year.
These stocks were in the NIFTY-50 in 2021, so they are survivors, and the period ends in 2021. Treat the numbers as a fair description of the past, not a forecast.
Limits
- Prices come from third parties and can be late or wrong.
- Alerts need Chrome to be open. If it was closed, the check runs when Chrome next starts.
- Recently listed stocks have too little history for a score.
- On exchange holidays nothing new arrives.
- Nothing here predicts the future. It describes the present against the past.
What it is not
Sensifty is not a tips service and not investment advice. It does not tell you to buy or sell, does not judge whether a company is a good business, and does not connect to your broker. See the disclaimer.