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Early Momentum

Early Momentum is the focused research view behind /momentum/early. It scans the full evaluated stock universe for earlier technical setups instead of only showing the confirmed Momentum Top 20.

Momentum Discovery lives at /momentum/discovery. It is the broader candidate-discovery and quality-audit surface; Early Momentum stays focused on setup timing.

It is not an options-ordering tool and it does not produce buy or sell instructions. The model separates:

  • trend setup quality;
  • breakout quality;
  • event catalyst context;
  • FMP fundamental and analyst confirmation;
  • Unusual Whales flow confirmation;
  • data quality and missing-source confidence.

The core difference from Momentum is timing. Momentum is the confirmation list: price action has already shown enough strength to rank in the main daily screen. Early Momentum tries to identify base-building, volatility contraction, breakout readiness, and early breakout attempts before they mature into confirmed leaders.

Setup Stages

Each row has a setup_stage:

  • base_building: range or platform is forming.
  • volatility_contraction: ATR, weekly range, Bollinger width, volume, or moving-average distance is compressing.
  • breakout_ready: price is close to a detected base pivot, but has not confirmed a breakout.
  • breakout_attempt: price briefly exceeded the pivot, but close, volume, or candle quality is not strong enough.
  • breakout_confirmed: close is above the pivot with sufficient buffer, volume confirmation, and a strong close location.
  • post_breakout_follow_through: breakout has already happened and price is holding above the pivot.
  • breakout_failed: price broke out and then fell back below the pivot.
  • extended: the stock is too far above a reasonable early-entry area.
  • no_setup: no usable early setup was detected.

The model does not treat "near a 60-day high" as "breakout confirmed". It separately tracks 20-day, 60-day, 120-day, 52-week, and base-pivot references.

Data Providers

FMP Premium contributes news events, earnings calendar, analyst grades, price targets, insider activity, institutional ownership summaries, and financial growth data. When an FMP endpoint is unavailable (plan tier or outage), the earnings-calendar, analyst-grade, and insider components fall back to Finnhub and the financial-growth component falls back to SEC-filed Massive data automatically; substituted components are flagged in the row's data-quality object.

Unusual Whales contributes options flow, dark-pool trades, lit-flow trades, options pulse, and flow resonance context.

Provider failures are not scored as real zeroes. Failed components become unavailable/null, available sibling components are reweighted, and the row's data_quality field lowers confidence.

Report Fields

The web page and Telegram report expose:

  • stage;
  • trend score;
  • catalyst score;
  • breakout quality;
  • data completeness;
  • pivot price and distance to pivot;
  • distance to 60-day high with two-decimal precision;
  • breakout volume ratio;
  • breakout confidence;
  • positive and negative reason codes;
  • invalidation condition.

Limits

Early Momentum is intentionally stricter than a simple "near high" list. A row can have strong news or unusual flow and still fail the trend setup gate. A row can have low volume and still be constructive during volatility contraction, but the same low volume will reduce breakout confirmation quality.

The output is descriptive market research, not investment advice.