A Coiled Spring™, what traders here call a dry coil, is a stock that has gone quiet in exactly the way it went quiet before its own past upper circuits.
Open it live: Coiled Spring.
The pattern
Smart money does not accumulate loudly. The sequence is die → drift → fire:
- Die, volume dries up, the stock stops making news
- Drift, price moves sideways, retail loses interest and sells out of boredom
- Fire. The operator has enough stock, and the price moves
The detector looks for stocks currently in stage 1-2 whose own history shows they have fired from this exact state before. That personal-history requirement is what makes it different from a generic "low volatility" screen, and it matters, because you have already seen that generic low-volatility screens measure 0.88×, worse than random.
Why the market is mostly this
Running the detector today: 356 of 476 stocks on the exchange classify as DEEP_LOADER. The archetype where a large holder accumulates patiently over long periods. That is 74.8% of the market.
This is the structural fact behind most of what you see on PSX. It is not primarily a market of institutions rebalancing; it is a market where concentrated holders run campaigns in individual names. It is also why the operator matters more than the ticker, ZEME follows the operator's behaviour, and does not maintain a permanent blacklist of any stock.
The honest limits, this one has several
- Today's run found 4 qualifying springs out of 476 stocks. This is a rare setup by design. A tool that fires constantly is not selective.
- Our broader research found the folk version of this idea, "stocks that die before they fire", is a myth when tested loosely. The dry-up alone is not the signal. It is the dry-up on a stock with a personal history of firing from it.
- The 74.8% DEEP_LOADER share is a classification, not a prediction. Most of those stocks will do nothing for months.
- Each spring carries a success rate and average gain from that stock's own history, small samples per stock, so treat them as context rather than probability.
The distinction worth carrying: quiet is not the signal. Quiet, on a stock that has historically exploded out of quiet, is the signal. Our own measurements are what forced that correction on us.
Do this now, practical activity
- Open Coiled Spring and note how few stocks are listed.
- Pick one. Open it in SuperCharts and set the range to 2 years.
- Find its previous upper circuits. Look at the 20-30 sessions immediately before each one.
- Ask: does today's chart look like those pre-fire stretches?
What this trains: the ability to compare a stock to its own past instead of to a general rule. That comparison is the entire idea behind the detector, and behind Market DNA, which does the same thing one level up, for the whole market.
Measured: 356 of 476 PSX stocks (74.8%) classify as DEEP_LOADER, and today's Coiled Spring scan returned 4 qualifying candidates from that universe.