Data Facts and Sources
Our stock, index, ETF, and mutual fund price and volume data from 1901 to 2016 were sourced from Global Financial Data (GFD), http://www.globalfinancialdata.com. Daily data start January 3, 1961. Post November 2015, our price and volume data are sourced from Norgate Premium Data, premiumdata.net. Interest rate data and other data used for our indicators are sourced from Pinnacle Data Systems, LLC, pinnacledata2.com. Stock Universe Our database consists of U.S.-domiciled, common stocks from the NYSE, NYSE Market (formerly the AMEX) and Nasdaq exchanges. For our indicators and strategies we only consider operating companies and have excluded the following types of listings:
The NYSE stocks are used in two of our indicators and it is important to clean up the NYSE so that securities that act more like bonds than stocks are excluded. Nearly 40 percent of the actively traded securities listed on the Big Board are not common stocks. Our final stock universe is limited to the top 50 percent in terms of dollar volume traded, so microcap and very small cap stocks are eliminated. As of December 1, 2017, our dbase contained 3,788 stocks and our stock universe was limited to the 1,894 stocks with the highest dollar volume. Number of Indicator Signals For historical testing, more is better when it comes to data and the same is true for the number of signals generated by an indicator and the number of signals that go into a model. You can generally have more confidence when the number of signals is higher, with 30 being a good number to keep in mind. You will see that, while our indicators do not always include 30 or more signals (we wish they did), the combined total signals generated by the seven indicators that are used to create our Safeguard 1st Risk Model equals 126 from July 2, 1987 through June 30, 2016, a level that we believe is satisfactory. |