Founder’s Note: It’s fair to say Quantitative Analyst Grant Hawkridge is the engineer behind everything we do at TrendLabs.
That goes for Everybody’s Wrong as well as The Divergence and, now, The Primary Trend.
Here’s Grant with a behind-the-scenes look at how we devised our NOW Score system. – JC
By Grant Hawkridge
G’day, Grant here again.
I’ve been on a weight-loss journey since February – and I’m down about 50 pounds so far.
It hasn’t come from shortcuts. No magic diet. No one-off workout.
It’s been process and consistency – day after day, stacking small wins.
Markets work the exact same way.
One trade won’t make you a winner, just like one salad won’t make you lean.
The real edge comes from sticking to structure.
Structure Over Impulse
In weight loss, the structure is simple: nutrition, training, sleep.
In markets, it’s trend, relative strength, and momentum.
Miss one piece, and the whole framework starts to wobble.
The biggest mistakes happen when we override the process.
Crash-dieting or chasing fads. Forcing breakouts or trading with gut feel.
Both end the same way: regret.
That’s why we built the NOW Score.
It strips out emotion and turns the market into process:
- Trend. Is price in a clean, stable uptrend across timeframes?
- Relative Strength. Is this stock leading its peers or falling behind?
- Momentum. Is the move accelerating, or running out of steam?
Stack those three, stay consistent, and the compounding takes care of itself.
When Process Meets Payoff
On April 8, 2025, the S&P 500 had crashed 18% in just 34 trading sessions.
Months of gains, erased in less than two months.
Panic was spreading.
By late April, the tone started to shift.
Price was grinding higher. Participation was widening.
It wasn’t a full green light, but the rebound had my attention.
On April 24, I ran the NOW Score to see if there were leaders worth putting risk behind.
First stop, sector rankings:
Defensive names still held the top spots.
But what grabbed me was the weekly change: Technology was ripping higher off those April lows faster than anything else.
From there, I pulled up the top 50 stocks in the S&P 500.
But I wasn’t after just anything – I wanted a stock leading in trend, relative strength, and momentum.
The top 10 list made it obvious:
Palantir (PLTR) sat at No. 3, with perfect relative strength and momentum scores and a trend score above 90.
This was a name from one of the hardest-hit sectors in the early 2025 pullback… now leading the recovery.
Then came the chart:
PLTR had carved out a base-on-base consolidation – my favorite kind of high-probability setup.
It was outperforming the market, riding strong momentum, in a sector that was in the process of flipping from a laggard to a leader.
The plan for me was simple: Buy above 108, first target 172, second target 275.
Seventy trading sessions later, PLTR hit that first target – a 58%-plus gain:
I took partial profits, and from there I’ll let the rest run – managing risk every step forward.
That’s the power of combining trend, relative strength, and momentum with disciplined execution – exactly what the NOW Score is built to surface in seconds.
It scans every stock in the S&P 500.
It ranks them across the three proven pillars of price action.
And it delivers a leaderboard of the market’s true leaders.
No guesswork. No gut feel. Just process.
It’s why Palantir was on my screen in April… and why we’ll be ready for the next one.
In the gym it’s meals, workouts, and recovery. In markets it’s trend, relative strength, and momentum.
It’s all process. It’s all consistency.
That’s the edge – in the gym, in life, and in markets.
The scale doesn’t lie. Neither does the primary trend.
Stay sharp,
Grant Hawkridge
Quantitative Analyst, TrendLabs