This is a quick summary of how the Stocktwits Top 25 indexes are constructed, formatted, and released each week.
First off, these indexes are purely objective exercises. We’re not subjectively picking stocks or saying if individual stocks are good or bad. Instead, we provide an updated list of the market’s best-performing stocks (year-to-date) every week. It’s a scoreboard of the market’s current trends and a way of tracking their changes over time.
The lists are comprised of the index’s underlying holdings. For example, the S&P 500 uses the S&P 500 stocks. The only time we adjust the list’s underlying holdings is when the asset managers running these indexes reconstitute them (usually 2x a year) and when individual stocks drop off because of a delisting, acquisition, or any other reason they might stop trading.
Next, we use Google Finance to pull the data in our tables automatically. The year-to-date formula calculates each stock’s return from its closing price on the last trading day of the previous year. The week-to-date formula calculates each stock’s return from last Friday’s closing price to the current Friday.
Once that data is pulled each week, we adjust the tables to include the top 25 stocks in each index by year-to-date performance. Then, we list which stocks made it and which fell out of the top 25 that week.
The “momentum meter” for the S&P 500 list is the average week-to-date performance of the list’s 25 components. And the “Top Dawg” of the week is simply the stock with the largest week-to-date gain across all three lists.
After all that, we manually review the entire post and deliver it to your inbox every Saturday at ~3 pm ET.
As of 01/20/24, we’ve added sentiment score and watcher count to our tables to provide additional context on each symbol. This data can be found on individual symbol pages.
This post was created on 03/03/2023 and will be updated if/when the process changes in the future.
