Combining Fundamental and Technical Analysis for Swing Trading: The Secret Weapon of Professional Traders

If you’ve been swing trading for any length of time, you’ve probably heard arguments for both technical and fundamental analysis. Some traders swear by chart patterns alone. Others won’t touch a stock without digging into its financials. But the truth is, combining both disciplines can give you a significant edge—one that professional traders have been quietly using for years.
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At Grok Trade, we don’t treat fundamentals and technicals as opposing camps. We treat them as complementary tools. And when you use them together in your swing trading strategy, your odds of success improve dramatically. In this post, you'll learn why this is the case and how you can start combining fundamentals and technicals for identifying high-probability trade setups.

Key Takeaways

• Fundamental analysis tells you what to trade; technical analysis tells you when and how to trade.
• Filtering your swing trade watchlist using fundamentals increases your probability of success.
• Free tools like Finviz and Navellier make it easy to combine both analysis methods.
• Focus on core metrics like PEG ratio, EPS growth, and insider/institutional activity to identify high-probability setups.
• Combining both approaches helps you swing trade with confidence, not guesswork.

Why Most Swing Traders Only Use One Analysis Method—and Why That’s a Mistake

Most swing traders start off learning either technical or fundamental analysis—rarely both. But relying on just one limits your edge and increases risk.

The Divide: Technical vs. Fundamental Swing Traders

Technical traders obsess over price patterns: bull flags, breakouts, and support/resistance levels. They use indicators and volume analysis to time their entries and exits. 
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Meanwhile, fundamental traders focus on the business: earnings reports, valuation metrics, insider activity, and institutional involvement. They care about what the company does, how it performs, and who’s backing it.

Each method has value—but each also has blind spots. Even fundamentally strong companies can undergo sharp selloffs that technical analysis might have helped anticipate. Likewise, even the most promising chart setups are more likely to fail when the stock’s fundamentals don’t support the technical picture.

Pool Corporation (NASDAQ: POOL) breaking out of an ascending triangle on 11/25/24.

Let’s take Pool Corporation (NASDAQ: POOL) as a real-world example. Pictured above is its daily chart as of the close on Monday, November 25th, 2024, breaking out from an ascending triangle—a classic bullish chart pattern. Technically speaking, this looked like a textbook long entry: price had repeatedly tested a horizontal resistance level throughout 2024, and it finally broke out with strong momentum, as shown by a wide bullish candle and a notable volume spike.

​Everything's looking great, so you proceed to take a long position. Time to sit back and let this thing ride, you think to yourself.

Pool Corporation (NASDAQ: POOL) ascending triangle failure.

Unfortunately for you and the rest of the bulls, that breakout candle marked the top. That high on 11/25/24 has yet to be surpassed. As of the time of this writing, the stock is trading more than 16% below that breakout level—154 days later and counting.

If you used great risk management strategies, this trade might have just been a routine loss—an expected cost of doing business. For the undisciplined trader, this trade could have landed a serious blow to their account.

In either case, the question becomes: Could this loss have been avoided? Sure, losses are part of the game—but was there a red flag that could’ve kept you from taking the trade altogether?

The answer is yes. A quick peak at POOL's fundamentals would have revealed just how fundamentally weak this stock is. Despite the bullish chart pattern, its poor earnings growth and negative institutional activity painted a very different picture. With this information, a trader might have passed on the setup—or better yet, started watching for bearish chart patterns instead.

This example illustrates a powerful truth: relying on just one method of analysis—whether technical or fundamental—limits your edge. While traders can be profitable using either approach on its own, the optimal strategy harnesses the strengths of both. Combining technical and fundamental analysis doesn’t just help you avoid bad trades; it helps you make more informed, higher-probability decisions with greater confidence.

Blending Fundamentals and Technicals: The Secret Sauce for Swing Traders

At Grok Trade, we teach swing traders to focus on going long on fundamentally strong stocks and focus on going short on fundamentally weak stocks. Why? Because trading is a business of probabilities. A great setup on a weak company lowers your edge. But when both technical and fundamental conditions align? That’s a trade worth taking. That's the secret sauce.

Put simply, we use fundamental analysis to find what stocks to trade, and we use technical analysis to determine when and how to trade them. ​Now that you understand why combining the two is beneficial, let's get into how you can start implementing this in your swing trading.

Step-by-Step: How to Find The Best Stocks To Swing Trade Using Fundamentals and Technicals

Here’s a simple process you can follow to generate two high-probability watchlists: one for fundamentally strong stocks to trade on the long side, and another for fundamentally weak stocks to trade on the short side.

Step 1: Use Finviz to Scan for Initial List of Fundamentally Strong or Weak Stocks

1. Go to finviz.com's screener tool.
2. Click the "All" tab to view all filtering options
3. Choose filters based on trade direction:

Bullish Scan Criteria

• Industry: Stocks only (ex-Funds)
• Price: Over $15
• Average Volume: Over 200K
• Institutional Transactions: Positive (>0%)
• PEG Ratio: Low (<1)
• EPS Growth qtr over qtr: Positive (>0%)​

Here's what that scan would look like:

Bullish Scan on Finviz.com as of 3/25/25.

At the time of this blogpost, this scan yielded 67 stocks—a far more manageable number compared to the 9,000+ stocks available in the market.

While there are additional filters we teach in our trading mentorship program, the goal is to end up with a focused list of 50-100 stocks after applying this initial scan.

IMPORTANT: Be sure to download, copy, or type this list into a spreadsheet or document using all capitalized ticker symbols, each followed by a comma and space—for example:

AAPL, TSLA, NVDA, etc.
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Formatting them this way will make the next step—refining your scan results using Navellier—much smoother.

Bearish Scan Criteria

The bearish filters are essentially the opposite of what you used to find the fundamentally bullish stocks:

• Industry: Stocks only (ex-Funds)
• Price: Over $20
• Average Volume: Over 200K
• Institutional Transactions: Negative (<0%)
• PEG Ratio: High (>2)
• EPS Growth qtr over qtr: Negative (<0%)​

Here's what the bearish scan would look like:

Bearish scan on Finviz.com as of 3/25/25.

This scan yielded 83 fundamentally weak stocks. Now you've got a list of 67 strong stocks with bullish fundamentals and 83 weak stocks with bearish fundamentals. You're well on your way.

At this stage, you’ve already done yourself a major favor by narrowing your focus from thousands of possibilities to two curated lists of long and short candidates. But there’s one more step you can take to refine this list even further and zero in on the highest-probability swing trade setups.

Step 2: Use Navellier to Refine Your Swing Trade List

Now it's time to fine-tune your lists even further—identifying the best of the best strong stocks for long trades, and the worst of the worst for short setups.

1. Go to Navellier's Stock Grader tool.
2. Create a free account and login.
3. Paste in your first stock list in the stock grader tool as seen below.

Navellier's Stock Grader tool.

Bullish Scan Criteria for Navellier

For the sake of saving space for this article, let's just take 7 random stocks from the bullish list (as opposed to all 67) to paste into the grader:

BAC, CHWY, COOP, HBAN, JEF, KGS, and PINS.

​For your bullish list, here's how you want to narrow it down to find only the strongest stocks:
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• First Two Columns (Total Stock Grade and Navellier Proprietary Quantitative Grade): A or B is acceptable. Stocks with a grade of C or lower in either of these columns should be discarded from the list—they don't qualify as being strong enough.
• Last Column (Free Cash Flow Grade): A through C is acceptable. Stocks with a grade of D or lower in this column should be discarded.

Example of a refined list of bullish stocks with Navellier's Stock Grader tool.

As exemplified above, 3 of the 7 randomly picked bullish stocks didn't qualify for one reason or another using the criteria mentioned above. We're left with BAC, CHWY, HBAN, and JEF—your newly refined bullish stock watchlist.

It goes without saying you want to paste all your bullish stocks into the grader when you do this for yourself, and go line by line discarding the stocks that don't qualify until you've got a newly refined list of fundamentally bullish stocks.

Bearish Scan Criteria for Navellier

After you've pasted in your bearish list, here's how you want to further refine your list to find the weakest stocks:
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• First Two Columns (Total Stock Grade and Navellier Proprietary Quantitative Grade): C through F is acceptable. Stocks with a grade of B or above in either of these columns should be discarded from the list—they don't qualify as being weak enough.
• Last Column (Free Cash Flow Grade): C through F is acceptable. Stocks with a grade of B or above in this column should be discarded.

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Like the bullish stock list example, let's proceed with 7 randomly chosen stocks from the 83 bearish stocks to save time and space in this article. We'll go with:

ADI, BECN, DEO, EQNR, HAL, JBL, and PNR.

Example of a refined list of bearish stocks with Navellier's Stock Grader tool.

After using the criteria above, we can confidently remove BECN, EQNR, and HAL from the bearish list—they simply don't meet the level of weakness we’re targeting.

At this point, you’ve done yourself a major favor—you’ve refined your universe of stocks down to only the most fundamentally strong and weak candidates. With your lists optimized, you’ve confidently positioned yourself to focus on the highest-probability swing trade setups on both the long and short side.

You've Got Your Watchlists—Now What?

Now that you've got your lists, it's time to "hurry up and wait". Don’t rush into a trade the moment your watchlist is complete. Instead, wait patiently for high-probability technical patterns to develop on the stocks you've filtered.

​For long trades, look for chart patterns like bull flags, high base breakouts, falling wedges, bullish pennants, and ascending triangles. For short trades, keep an eye out for , bear flags, low base breakdowns, bearish pennants, rising wedges, and descending triangles.
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Each trade should be backed by a clear entry signal, a stop-loss based on technical invalidation, and a profit target or trade management strategy that offers a favorable risk-to-reward ratio.

If you're unfamiliar with any of the chart patterns mentioned here, take time to study them at FreeOnlineTradingEducation.com, where you'll find free resources and visual examples to deepen your understanding.

How Often Should I Run These Scans?

A good rule of thumb is to run this scan once a month, ideally near the end of each month when most earnings reports have been released and institutional behavior is more visible. However, depending on market volatility and your trading style, you may choose to scan more frequently—such as weekly or biweekly—especially if you're actively managing multiple swing trades. Just remember: the goal isn’t to constantly chase new trades but to identify high-probability setups that align with your strategy. Repeating the scan regularly keeps your watchlist fresh and focused.

Final Thoughts: Swing Trade Smarter with a Dual Analysis Approach

Swing trading is a game of probabilities. The more you can stack those probabilities in your favor, the better your long-term results. That’s why combining both fundamental and technical analysis is such a powerful approach—it helps you stop guessing and start trading with greater precision and purpose.
At Grok Trade, we help traders build repeatable, rules-based systems that thrive on consistency. Our dual-filter method—screening with fundamentals and timing with technicals—is one of the most effective strategies we teach.
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If you’re ready to trade with more confidence, better setups, and stronger conviction, start blending both types of analysis into your routine today.

Want to take it to the next level? Visit groktrade.com/tradingmentor to learn more about our structured swing trading mentorship program.