Minervini Trend Template: The 8 Screener Criteria

Most professional traders describe their process in adjectives. Mark Minervini published his opening filter as a checklist of eight pass/fail conditions — moving-average alignment, distance from the 52-week high and low, and a relative-strength rank. That is unusually screener-shaped, which is why the Trend Template has been rebuilt in almost every scanner on the market. This guide walks each criterion, shows how to express it in a screener, and is honest about the two thresholds that get quietly changed in transit and the one criterion you cannot reproduce at all outside Investor's Business Daily.

Who is Mark Minervini

Minervini is a US equity trader and the author of Trade Like a Stock Market Wizard (McGraw-Hill, 2013) and Think & Trade Like a Champion (2016); he was one of the traders interviewed in Jack Schwager's Stock Market Wizards. He finished first in the 1997 US Investing Championship with a 155% annual return, and won the 2021 contest's $1,000,000+ stock division with +334.8% — a contest record, the previous best being +119.1% set by George Tkaczuk in 2020. The championship describes itself as a real-money verified competition, with entrants' brokerage statements used to confirm the figures (press release). His wider methodology is branded SEPA®, a registered mark that appears on his own site.

A note on integrity before we go further: InvestingPaths is an independent research site and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Mark Minervini. Everything below is our summary of his publicly documented criteria, attributed as such. Trading involves substantial risk of loss, and nothing here is financial advice or a promise of any result. A checklist that a full-time professional uses as the first of several filters is not a strategy in anyone else's hands.

The eight criteria, and what each one is in a screener

The Trend Template is a gate: a stock either passes all eight at once or it is off the list. Nothing here is weighted or scored.

A note on provenance before the numbers: the template originates in Trade Like a Stock Market Wizard, and the version below is the one carried consistently across screener vendor documentation and published script implementations. We have not transcribed it from the book, so treat the thresholds as well-corroborated secondary sourcing rather than a quotation.

Criteria 6 and 7 are the interesting pair, because together they are a squeeze rather than two separate filters. Well off the low and close to the high can only both be true of a stock that has been advancing for a while and has not given the advance back. That excludes the bounce off a crash low and the sideways survivor in one move, which is the whole design intent.

Criteria 1 through 5 are one idea stated five ways: the short, medium and long averages stacked in the right order with price on top. Minervini's own framing for criterion 7 is that the closer to a new high, the better — a preference, not a second threshold.

The two numbers that change in transit

If you compare five published "Minervini scans" you will find they disagree, and the disagreements are always in the same two places. Worth knowing which number is his.

The 52-week low: 30%, not 25%. Trade Like a Stock Market Wizard states at least 30% above the 52-week low, and notes that many of the best candidates are far higher than that — 100% or more above their low — before they ever break out. A meaningful number of screener implementations relax it to 25%, and some blog write-ups quote 25% as if it were the published figure. It is not. If you are building this yourself, 30% is the criterion; 25% is somebody's loosening. In fairness, we are reading the book's figure through the screener documentation and write-ups that quote it rather than reproducing the passage here — if you own the book, check it against your own copy.

The 200-day's uptrend duration. The rule is "at least one month". Screeners have to turn that into a bar count, and they pick different ones — 20 sessions, 21, 22, sometimes a full 25. Any of them is a reasonable reading; none of them is his stated number, because he did not state one. Expect small differences in the result list purely from that choice.

And one criterion you cannot rebuild at all. Criterion 8 refers to the RS Rating published by Investor's Business Daily — a proprietary 1-to-99 percentile ranking with a calculation IBD does not disclose. Every free tool that offers a "Minervini Trend Template" scan is therefore running seven criteria plus a substitute, usually a percentile rank of trailing 12-month return. That substitute is directionally the same idea and is not the same number, and a stock can sit either side of 70 depending on which one you use. Treat any RS condition outside IBD's own products as an approximation.

What the template is actually testing

Minervini's framing is stage-based, and the lineage runs back to Stan Weinstein's stage analysis: a stock spends its life cycling through basing, advancing, topping and declining, and the Trend Template is a machine-readable definition of "currently advancing". That is why every condition points the same way and none of them is a value or reversal test. The template will never hand you a cheap stock, and it is not supposed to.

The practical consequence is worth stating plainly: everything that passes is, by construction, already extended. The template does not tell you to buy anything. In Minervini's own sequence it is the first gate — the universe cut that precedes looking at fundamentals, at the general market's direction, and at the chart for a specific entry. Skipping straight from a Trend Template list to a buy is using one-fifth of a process. If you want the trend-following ideas underneath it, our guides to moving averages in technical analysis and the breakout trading strategy cover the mechanics.

Building it in TC2000

TC2000's Personal Criteria Formula language expresses seven of the eight conditions directly, which is why this template and that scanner keep appearing together. Each line below is a separate PCF condition in an EasyScan; all of them have to be checked at once.

C > AVGC150 AND C > AVGC200
AVGC150 > AVGC200
AVGC50 > AVGC150 AND AVGC50 > AVGC200
C > AVGC50
C > 1.30 * MINL252
C > 0.75 * MAXH252
AVGC200 > AVGC200.21

AVGC150 is the 150-period simple average of the close, MINL252 and MAXH252 are the lowest low and highest high over 252 sessions (roughly a year of trading days), and the .21 suffix on the last line references the value 21 bars ago — TC2000's offset notation for "a month back". Verify that last line in TC2000's own formula editor before you trust a scan built on it; offsets are the part of PCF syntax people most often get subtly wrong.

Two practical notes. Custom PCFs are a Premium-tier feature — you can chart and scan on built-in conditions on lower plans, but writing your own formula conditions requires Premium. And TC2000 covers US and Canadian listings only, so this workflow does not apply to European or Asian markets. Our EasyScan setups guide walks the mechanics of building saved conditions if you have not done it before.

Testing the idea without a subscription

You do not need a paid scanner to interrogate the template — you need to answer a different question first, which is whether trend conditions of this kind actually did anything on real prices.

Our free backtester covers more of the template than you might expect. Price vs moving average handles criteria 1 and 5 (price above the 150-, 200- and 50-day); Moving average comparison, plus the stack and slope rules, covers the ordering and the rising 200-day in criteria 2, 3 and 4; and Distance from the 52-week high or low takes either reference, so criterion 6 (beyond 30% of the low) and criterion 7 (within 25% of the high) are both expressible. Stack them as entry conditions and you can watch what a Trend-Template-shaped filter did over years of daily bars, with fees on.

Being straight about the one real gap: criterion 8 is a percentile rank against the whole market, and that does not exist in our vocabulary. The closest rule, Relative strength vs the index, measures return against the S&P 500 as a difference rather than a rank — related, not the same. So you can test seven of the eight, and approximate the last one. Running the rules across the whole universe is free too, and unmetered; what a subscription buys is intraday freshness and screening at past dates, not access to the screen itself.

For the relative-strength half — the spirit of criterion 8 — our momentum screener ranks large US companies each month by their return over the past year (skipping the most recent month, which tends to reverse) and publishes a 15-year backtest of holding the top of that list. Again, honestly: that is a relative strength ranking, and it is not IBD's RS Rating. It is useful for seeing whether "own what is already strongest" survived contact with 15 years of data, which is the assumption the eighth criterion rests on. The high versus low momentum guide is the conceptual companion.

Value screens are the opposite instrument and we keep them separate: if you want a stock ranked on what it earns rather than how it trends, that is the value screener.

Where the Trend Template stops

Three things sit beyond the checklist, and they are progressively less documented — which is exactly the order in which you should trust write-ups about them.

• The general market. Minervini requires the broader market to be in a confirmed uptrend before trading the list at all. That is a stated part of the process, not a screener condition.
• Fundamentals. His approach looks for accelerating earnings and sales growth alongside the technical picture. The direction is documented; a single hard cutoff is not, and lists of exact growth percentages circulating online should be read as somebody's interpretation.
• The Volatility Contraction Pattern (VCP). This is his entry pattern: a base in which successive pullbacks get shallower on declining volume, tightening toward a pivot. The shape is well documented. The tidy percentage ladders you will see quoted — a 20–30% first contraction, then 10–15%, then 5–8% — are illustrative examples rather than a published rule set, and treating them as thresholds is how a qualitative pattern becomes a false precision.

An honest look at the limits

• It is a filter, not a signal. Passing the template says a stock is in an uptrend. It says nothing about entry, stop, position size, or what happens next.
• It is backward-looking by design. A rising 200-day average and a price near the highs are facts about the past year. You are deliberately late; that is the trade being made, not a flaw to engineer away.
• The list empties in a bear market. That is information — but a screen returning four names is not a portfolio, and forcing trades from a thin list is where mechanical filters do their damage.
• One criterion is not reproducible. See above. Any tool advertising the full template outside IBD is approximating criterion 8.
• We are not publishing a backtest of the template here. Doing that honestly needs a survivorship-free universe and a defined entry and exit, and we would rather say so than quote a number we have not earned.

Frequently asked questions

What are Mark Minervini's Trend Template criteria? Eight conditions that must all be true at once: price above the 50-, 150- and 200-day moving averages; the 50-day above the 150- and 200-day; the 150-day above the 200-day; the 200-day rising for at least a month; price at least 30% above the 52-week low; price within 25% of the 52-week high; and a relative-strength rank of at least 70.

Is the 52-week low criterion 25% or 30%? 30%, as far as we can establish — it is the figure multiple screener vendors and script authors attribute to Trade Like a Stock Market Wizard, though we have not checked it against the printed page ourselves. The 25% version circulating in screener implementations is a loosening rather than a published number. If you own the book, trust your copy over this page.

Can I run the Trend Template for free? Seven of the eight criteria, yes — moving-average alignment and distance from the 52-week high and low are standard conditions in most screeners. The eighth relies on IBD's proprietary RS Rating, so free tools substitute something similar rather than reproduce it.

Is the Trend Template the same as SEPA or VCP? No. The Trend Template is the universe filter. SEPA® is Minervini's overall methodology, and the VCP is the chart pattern he looks for on the names that survive the filter. The template is the first step, not the whole method.

Does passing the Trend Template mean a stock is a buy? No. Everything that passes is already in an established uptrend near its highs. The template produces a watchlist; the entry, the stop and the risk stay with you.

Build it and see what it leaves

The Trend Template's real virtue is that it is falsifiable: eight numbers, no judgment, no interpretation needed to know whether a stock passes. That makes it a good thing to build yourself rather than take on faith — run it, look at what it returns in a strong tape and in a weak one, and notice how much of the work is still left over when the list appears.

If you want to test trend conditions on real daily prices right now, start with the backtester — free, no signup, fees on. If you want the scanner Minervini's criteria are most commonly built in, TC2000's Premium plan is where Personal Criteria Formulas live. Either way, the checklist finds candidates. The risk stays yours.