Momentum screening when the market is weak: the Defensive Strength screen

When a broad advance stalls, the momentum screens here return fewer names — not because the ranking breaks, but because the rules beside it are absolute and start failing. Defensive Strength is the screen for those stretches. It looks for liquid US names in defensive industries that are still above their 200-day moving average and have moved less than the market over the past year, and it lists them lowest beta first. This page is what it tests, how to read the list, and what it is not.

Why the bullish lists thin out

Relative strength is a ranking, so it never runs out. Each stock's three-month return is ranked against the rest of the screened universe and reported as a percentile from 0 to 100, so there is a top of the ranking every day, whatever the market did. In a weak tape the names at the top of that ranking are simply the ones falling least, and the percentile cannot tell you which situation you are in.

What thins the lists is everything else. The other rules are absolute, not relative, and they are tests against a stock's own history:

Momentum Continuation requires price above the 50-day moving average and a minimum average daily range, on top of its relative-strength floor.
Trend Template requires price above the 150-day and the 200-day averages, the averages stacked, the 200-day itself rising, and price within a set distance of the 52-week high. The full list is in the trend template checklist.
Swing Momentum requires price above both the 50-day and the 200-day averages and an average daily range inside a band.

When prices fall those are the rules that fail, and the passing counts fall with them. The setup tags work the same way: BASE needs a tight moving-average bundle with price sitting on it, which is a measurement of the bars rather than a place in the ranking. None of this is a forecast — it is arithmetic on the same bars, and a short list is the screen reporting what it found rather than an opinion about what comes next.

That is the gap Defensive Strength fills. It is not a bullish screen with looser thresholds; it asks a different question.

What the Defensive Strength screen tests

Four rules on the numbers, and a name has to clear all four before the industry test below even runs.

Enough history, and a computable beta. The screen needs a 200-day moving average and a one-year beta, so it downloads a full year of daily bars rather than the nine-month window the shorter screens use. A name without that history is left out rather than failed. So is a name whose beta comes back as exactly zero, which the run reads as "not computed" rather than as a real reading.
Liquidity. Average dollar volume over the last 50 sessions of at least $20 million — closing price times volume, averaged, not share count. This is an at-least test, not a strictly-greater one.
A long-term uptrend. Price strictly above the 200-day simple moving average. This is the rule that makes it a strength screen rather than a sector list: a defensive name in a downtrend of its own does not qualify, however defensive its industry.
A beta below 1.0. One-year beta against the benchmark, strictly less than 1.0. Below one means the stock has moved less than the market over the window, which is the whole point of the screen.

Then the industry test, which is the last one and the only one that depends on something other than price. Each row carries an industry description taken from the stock's own filing, and the screen keyword-matches it against three groupings — healthcare, utilities and consumer staples. Electric and water utilities, grocers and food producers, tobacco, household products, pharmaceutical and hospital names all match. It is a keyword test on a filing's own wording rather than a curated list, so it is approximate at the edges, and the description that decided each row is shown on the row.

Worth noticing: pharmaceuticals and biotechnology are excluded from the Momentum Continuation screen by default, because binary drug-trial moves are not momentum in the sense that screen measures. Here they count as defensive. The two screens are asking opposite questions about the same industry, which is a good illustration of why a screen's rules matter more than its label.

How beta is computed. Take the stock's daily returns and the benchmark's over the last 252 sessions, line them up, and divide the covariance between them by the benchmark's variance. At least 60 paired returns are required or the figure is not computed at all. The result is rounded to three decimals and carried on the row as beta_1y — the same field name in the result document, the CSV export and the API.

How to read the list

The list opens lowest beta first. That is this screen's own default sort, and it is deliberately not relative strength: sorting a defensive screen by strength would rank it by the thing it is not selecting for. The top of the list is therefore the steadiest names that cleared the rules, not the strongest ones.

Relative strength is still on the row, and there is one thing to understand about it here. The percentile on this screen is computed within this screen's own candidate set — the liquid, above-the-200-day, below-1.0 beta names — rather than against the whole market. It is a way of telling two rows on this list apart, not a claim about where the stock ranks in the market. The dashboard's relative-strength control for this screen defaults to "any" for exactly that reason, and its own tooltip says to keep it loose.

The controls above the table are declared by the screen rather than by this page: a ticker search, a sector filter, an industry multi-select, a beta cut (0.5, 0.7, 1.0, 1.2, opening at 1.0, which is the screen's own ceiling), the relative-strength cut above, and the setup-tag preset. Every row opens a candlestick chart in place, drawn from the same end-of-day bars the screen used, which is where "above the 200-day average" stops being a column and becomes a picture.

Two absences are deliberate. There is no near-miss list on this screen — a name that missed a rule is in the run's universe file with the rules it failed written on it, which is a more useful answer than a second table. And there is no value list either. Both exist on the Momentum Continuation screen and are specific to it.

A free account sees the top 5 names of each screen, ranked by that screen's own sort — so the free slice of this one is the 5 lowest-beta passing names, with their beta attached rather than as bare tickers.

What this screen is not

Not a short list. Every rule is a long-side rule. A stock has to be above its 200-day average to appear at all.
Not a hedge. A beta below 1.0 means a stock has moved less than the market, not against it. Nothing here selects for negative correlation, and a list of stocks is not a hedge against a portfolio of stocks.
Not a timing signal. The screen reads no market indicator, no volatility index and no breadth measure. It runs identically every trading day and takes no view on whether the market is weak; the only thing that changes is which names pass. If you want a sense of the tape from the data on the site, the honest version is the passing counts across all six screens and the sector strength ranking, not this list.
Not advice. It is a list of stocks that passed a handful of published rules. It does not know your positions, your timeframe or your risk.

How to use this in QM Screener

Open the dashboard at https://qmscreener.com/ and pick Defensive Strength in the screen picker at the top. There is no per-screen link to bookmark; the picker is how a screen is chosen. The one deep link the dashboard takes is ?view=chart&t=TICKER, which opens straight onto a chart.
Read it in its own order first. Lowest beta at the top. Resist re-sorting by relative strength before you have looked at what the default sort put there.
Narrow by industry, not by strength. The industry multi-select is the useful control on this screen: healthcare, utilities and consumer staples are three different groupings sitting inside one list.
Compare against the bullish screens on the same day. Switch to Momentum Continuation and Trend Template and look at how many names each returns. The comparison is the information; either list on its own is not.
Chart before you conclude. Every row opens its chart in place, and the 200-day average is one of the overlays.
Take the list with you. Export as a TradingView watchlist, a CSV, a PNG of the table or share text, or read the same result document over the HTTP API and the MCP server.

A free account — a verified email address, no card — sees the top 5 names of each screen every day and can chart them. The full list, the per-row values and the exports are $10 a month or $84 a year, each starting with a 7-day free trial. Start there, or sign in if you already have an account.

QM Screener is an independent product, assembled from publicly documented criteria, and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any trader, author, publisher or firm.

Frequently asked questions

Does this screen find stocks to short?

No. Every rule on it is a long-side rule: price has to be above the 200-day moving average, the name has to clear a liquidity floor, and its industry has to be one of the defensive ones. Nothing here produces a short list, and there is no screen on this site that does.

Why is the list sorted by beta instead of relative strength?

Because beta is what this screen is about. Each screen here opens on the number its own thesis is about — relative strength where the thesis is strength, the final range on the contraction screen, the size of the gap on the gap screen. The thesis here is that a name has held its long-term uptrend while moving less than the market, so the list opens lowest beta first and relative strength is the second column rather than the sort.

What counts as a defensive industry?

The data behind each row carries an industry description from the stock's own filing, and the screen keyword-matches it against three groupings: healthcare, utilities, and consumer staples. Pharmaceutical and biotechnology names are defensive by that test, which is the opposite of how they are treated on the momentum continuation screen, where they are excluded by default.

Does the screen behave differently when the market falls?

The screen does not read the market at all. The same rules run every trading day; what changes is how many names satisfy them. The benchmark's own three-month return is recorded beside the list for context, and beta is measured against the benchmark, but no rule tests the state of the market and nothing switches the screen on or off.

Is a beta below 1.0 the same as low risk?

No. Beta here is one number computed one way: the covariance of the stock's daily returns with the benchmark's, divided by the benchmark's variance, over the last year of sessions. It describes how the two have moved together in the past. It says nothing about the company, the position size you would take, or what either will do next. Nothing on this site is financial advice.