Stan Weinstein's stage analysis is the ancestor of most trend screens in use today — including the Minervini Trend Template, which is essentially a machine-readable definition of Weinstein's Stage 2. The original is older and less tidy: four stages, one long moving average, a relative-strength line, a volume confirmation. Some of that is arithmetic a scanner can do; some is a line you draw with your own eyes. This guide separates the two, gives the numbers that are actually his, and flags the ones the internet invented on his behalf.
Who is Stan Weinstein
Weinstein published The Professional Tape Reader from 1972 to 2000 and has published Global Trend Alert for institutional clients from 1990 onward; from the late 1970s he was a frequent guest on PBS's Wall $treet Week With Louis Rukeyser and Nightly Business Report. Those details come from Technical Analysis of Stocks & Commodities — "A Conversation With Stan Weinstein" by Leslie N. Masonson, V.39:11, November 2021, pages 28–36.
The method lives in one book: Stan Weinstein's Secrets For Profiting in Bull and Bear Markets, published in 1988 by Dow Jones-Irwin (Open Library record) and reissued by McGraw-Hill in 1992 (that edition's record, which is the one carrying the book's opening line). Both run to 348 pages, and that opening line is the argument the book spends them demolishing: "Buy low, sell high! That's the shortcut to a fortune, right?" The answer is no — you buy what is already going up, once the chart says the advance has started.
A note on integrity before we go further: InvestingPaths is an independent research site and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Stan Weinstein. Everything below is our summary of his publicly documented material, attributed as such. Trading involves substantial risk of loss, and nothing here is financial advice or a promise of any result. A framework a professional uses as one input among many is not a strategy in anyone else's hands.
The one number everything hangs on
Weinstein's primary trend reference is the 30-week moving average on a weekly chart — this Friday's close added to the previous 29 Friday closes, divided by 30. He also uses a 10-week average as the trader's shorter reference. That is the whole indicator set: no oscillator, no confirmation study.
Two conversions matter in a daily-bar screener, and both are where write-ups get sloppy:
- 30 weeks is 150 trading sessions, not 200. A 30-week SMA and a 200-day SMA are not the same line — 200 sessions is roughly 40 weeks, so a scan built on the 200-day turns roughly ten weeks slower than the book's. That arithmetic is fixed. What it does not support is the usual next step, treating anyone on the 200-day as having left the method: notes from his 2021 interviews report him saying he "uses the 200dma now more than the 30-week MA" and the 50-day, and that "it's still the same concept of 4 stages". Pick your line knowing the two are different lines — not knowing that one of them is his.
- A 150-day SMA of daily closes is the closest equivalent to the book's 30 weeks, and it approximates rather than translates: it averages 150 prices where his averages 30, so it is smoother and turns at a slightly different moment. Near a flat base the two can disagree about whether the average is still declining — exactly the moment the method cares about. There is a second wrinkle in the same direction. Weinstein defines the average on page 13 as a plain average of 30 Friday closes, but page 25 notes that the Mansfield charts he reads it on do not print a simple average at all — they print a weighted 30-week line, in which recent weeks count for more, and which Brain's notes observe looks closer to a 20-to-21-week exponential average. So a 150-day SMA converts the definition, not the chart he was actually looking at.
His 10-week average maps the same way, to a 50-day.
The four stages, and what a screener can see
| Stage | What the chart is doing | The mechanical part | The part you judge |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 — Basing | Sideways after a decline; the 30-week MA flattens; price whipsaws across it; volume dries up, then picks up late in the base | Tight range over N weeks; MA slope near zero; recent average volume below its longer average | Whether it is a base at all, and where its ceiling is |
| 2 — Advancing | Breaks out of the base and spends the advance above a rising 30-week MA, making higher highs and higher lows | Price above the 150-day SMA; that SMA rising; higher-high/higher-low structure | When Stage 2 began; whether a pullback is normal or the end |
| 3 — Topping | Advance stalls; price cuts below the 10-week MA on heavy volume; the 30-week MA flattens and rolls over | MA slope crosses from rising to flat; price below the 50-day | Pause in Stage 2, or a top |
| 4 — Declining | Below a falling 30-week MA; lower highs and lower lows; rallies on light volume | Price below the 150-day SMA and that SMA falling | Little — this one is the honest one |
The stages are Weinstein's; the screener column is our translation, and the right-hand column is the point of the table. Stage analysis is a classification, and a screener cannot classify — only test conditions usually true inside a class. A stock passing "above a rising 150-day SMA" is consistent with Stage 2. It is not proof, and no formula produces the proof.
The Stage 1 → 2 breakout, condition by condition
This is the method at its most screener-shaped. The buy is the break from a Stage 1 base into Stage 2, and it carries four conditions.
| Condition | Weinstein's guidance | How you'd screen it | Sourcing |
|---|---|---|---|
| The breakout | Price clears the resistance ceiling of the Stage 1 base | Highest-high or highest-close break over a fixed lookback | His; the fixed lookback is a substitute |
| The moving average | Price above the 30-week MA, and the MA must not be declining | Price over 150 SMA and the 150-day SMA rising | His; the slope is the stricter half |
| Relative strength | The RS line versus the market turning from negative to positive | A return-vs-index comparison over a fixed window | His idea; the threshold is convention |
| Volume | A weekly volume expansion on the break — most commonly given as at least 2× the prior month's average | Volume over 2× its 20-bar average | Disputed — see below |
The slope condition does most of the work. "Above the 30-week MA" is easy to pass — a stock two days into a dead-cat bounce can do it. "Above a 30-week MA that is not declining" is a much smaller list, and it is what keeps the screen out of Stage 4 bounces. Build that one first.
Relative strength here means the RS line, not RSI. They are unrelated: RSI is an oscillator built from a stock's own closes; the RS line is the stock's price divided by a market index, plotted over time. Weinstein's charts used the Mansfield relative strength version, which normalises that ratio against its own one-year average so the line oscillates around zero — above zero means outperforming. Most implementations reduce his emphasis on the crossover to a static "RS > 0" gate. Reasonable, but the threshold is the implementer's, and the Mansfield formula circulating online is community-documented rather than published.
The numbers that change in transit
Five published Weinstein scans will disagree in the same three places every time.
The volume multiple: 2×, 2–3×, or 3×. A chapter-by-chapter reading of the book reports the rule as a weekly volume spike of at least twice the previous month's average, or a three-to-four-week buildup at twice the prior average followed by a further increase in the breakout week. Notes from his 2021 interviews record him saying he likes at least three times normal volume on the break. Both can be true — a floor in the book, a preference in conversation three decades later — but a 3× screen returns a fraction of the names a 2× screen does. We have not read the printed page, so treat 2× as well-corroborated secondary sourcing and 3× as an interview remark.
And a quieter problem with all of those figures: his is a weekly bar against a four-week average. Almost every screener offering this rule compares a daily bar to a daily average — a different measurement wearing the same words. One explosive Tuesday clears a daily 2× test in a week whose total volume is unremarkable.
How long a Stage 1 base has to be. Weinstein describes bases forming over weeks to months, and longer bases supporting bigger advances, but there is no published minimum. Screeners have to pick a lookback anyway — 20 weeks, 30, whatever the default is — and that choice alone moves the result list more than most of the other conditions.
Where the stop goes — and which stop. Thomas Bulkowski's notes on Weinstein's stop rules give two rules for two different jobs, and write-ups routinely swap them. The initial stop is the percentage one: Bulkowski reports Weinstein recommending 8%, 10% "or whatever" below the purchase price — while noting in the same breath that Weinstein is no fan of percentages, because each chart should dictate its own level. The moving-average rule is the trailing stop: keep it below the lower of the 30-week average and the minor low, ratcheted up as price rises, and tighten it once a stock enters Stage 3. Coding the average-and-minor-low level as your entry stop is using the trailing rule one trade early.
What you genuinely cannot mechanise
Being straight here is the difference between a useful screen and a false one.
- Stage transitions are judged, not computed. Every boundary is obvious in hindsight and ambiguous live. A flattening average is a fact; "the base is complete" is an opinion.
- The base's ceiling is a line you draw. Weinstein's breakout is a break of that level. A screener's N-day high is a fixed-window stand-in that fires on stocks with no base at all, and misses a genuine breakout whose base is longer than the window.
- Overhead resistance is a chart read. He prefers breakouts with little supply above them — old, distant resistance rather than recent. "How much stock is trapped above here" is a judgement, not a condition.
- The market's stage, and the sector's, come first. He applies stage analysis to indices and industry groups before individual names — two more classifications with the same problem.
A tool advertising a fully automated Weinstein scan is running the four mechanical conditions above and calling the result a stage. That is still a good watchlist. It is not stage analysis.
Building it in TC2000
TC2000's Personal Criteria Formula language expresses the mechanical half directly. Each line is a separate PCF condition in an EasyScan, all checked at once:
C > AVGC150
AVGC150 >= AVGC150.10
C > AVGC50
V > 2 * AVGV20
Read in order: price above the 150-day average; that average no lower than ten bars ago (the "not declining" condition); price above the 50-day; volume at twice its 20-day average. Confirm the offset notation in TC2000's own formula editor first — the .10 suffix meaning "ten bars ago" is the part of PCF syntax people most often get subtly wrong, and AVGV should be checked against the platform's function list rather than taken from a blog.
Custom PCFs are a Premium feature — lower plans scan on built-in conditions, but your own formulas require Premium. TC2000 covers US and Canadian listings only. Our EasyScan setups guide walks the mechanics, and the Qullamaggie scan settings page shows the same platform driving a faster momentum screen.
Testing it without a subscription
You can build every mechanical condition above in our free backtester and see what it did on real daily bars, no signup. That link opens with a 0.1% fee and 0.05% slippage already set, because the tool's own default is zero on both — costs are a switch you turn on, not something it assumes for you.
The rules that map, in the builder's exact wording: Price over 150 SMA is the moving-average condition, and The 150-day SMA is rising over 20 bars, by at least 0% is the slope condition — the important one. Return over 63 bars beats the S&P 500 by over 0% covers relative strength. Volume is over 2× its 20-bar average is the breakout confirmation, and The 5-bar average volume is under 0.7× the 20-bar average the dry-up preceding it. For the base and the break: Range over last 10 days is under 5%, Close above the prior 20-day close extreme, and Higher highs and higher lows on 5-bar swings within 120 bars.
Four honest limits, all ours rather than his:
- Daily bars only. No weekly-bar mode, so every rule measures on daily data: the 150-day SMA is the approximation described above, and the volume rule is a daily bar against a daily average.
- The relative-strength rule is a return difference, not a Mansfield line. It compares the stock's return over a window against the S&P 500's over the same window — 0% means it kept pace. No one-year normalisation, and therefore no zero-line crossover to watch.
- Signed-out runs cover five years. Longer histories are the paid window. A 150-day average also needs 150 bars before it means anything, so the start of a run is unevaluable — the setup preview reports bars, evaluable bars and bars fired separately, so that warm-up is visible rather than counted as failure.
- The universe-wide screen is fundamentals only, and the universe is not the market. The free screen behind the builder's first step runs unmetered, but over the US SEC filers we hold point-in-time filings for, capped at 2,000 names — and it answers questions about the company: size, liquidity, growth, returns on capital. Its two volume rules are an average-volume floor and a relative-volume ratio, both measured against a 63-day average. The chart conditions are evaluated per ticker, so you cannot run a Weinstein breakout scan over every stock here the way EasyScan does.
For relative strength in ranked form, our momentum screener ranks large US companies by trailing return each month, with a 15-year backtest of holding the top of it — the "own what is already strongest" assumption Weinstein's RS condition rests on, tested. For the mechanics underneath, see moving averages and the breakout trading strategy; the swing trading playbook covers the trade management a screen never touches. Value screens are a different instrument: that is the value screener.
Frequently asked questions
What is the 30-week moving average in Weinstein's method? The average of the last 30 weekly closes, plotted on a weekly chart. Its slope and price's position relative to it define which stage a stock is in. On daily bars the nearest equivalent to the book's line is a 150-day simple moving average, because 30 weeks is 150 trading sessions. The 200-day that many write-ups substitute is a genuinely different line — roughly 40 weeks — though notes from his 2021 interviews report Weinstein himself now leaning on the 200-day more than on the 30-week.
What are the four stages? Stage 1 basing (sideways, flat MA), Stage 2 advancing (above a rising MA), Stage 3 topping (MA flattening and rolling over), Stage 4 declining (below a falling MA). The method's central instruction is to own stocks in Stage 2 and never in Stage 4.
How much volume does a Stage 2 breakout need? The figure most commonly attributed to the book is at least twice the prior month's average weekly volume; in 2021 interviews he is reported as preferring three times normal. We could not verify either against the printed page, and weekly-versus-daily measurement matters as much as the multiple.
Can I screen for stage analysis automatically? Partly. The moving average, its slope, relative strength versus an index and a volume expansion are mechanical. The stage classification, the base's resistance line, overhead supply and the market's own stage are not — a screen claiming otherwise is renaming its four conditions.
Is Minervini's Trend Template the same thing? No, but it descends from it. The Trend Template is eight pass/fail conditions describing a stock already in Stage 2 — which is why its longest averages are the 150- and 200-day, the 150 being the daily form of Weinstein's 30 weeks. Stage analysis covers the whole cycle, including when to be out.
Build the mechanical half and look at what is left
Stage analysis is unusually honest about where the automation stops. Four conditions — above the 150-day average, that average not falling, outperforming the index, volume expanding on the break — are arithmetic you can run today. The rest is a chart, a judgement and a stop.
To test those four on real prices, start with the backtester: free, no signup, and that link arrives with fees and slippage switched on. To run them across the US market nightly, TC2000's Premium plan is where Personal Criteria Formulas live. Either way the screen only produces candidates. The stage call, and the risk, stay yours.