The Engine

Phoenix Model

A transparent walkthrough of how every pick is scored — from raw data to final ranking.

Philosophy

Pattern recognition, not prediction

The Phoenix model doesn't attempt to predict price movements. Instead it identifies candidates that share strong statistical similarity to a benchmark cohort of stocks that went on to produce 60%+ gains.

This is done using Mahalanobis distance — a multivariate metric that measures how similar a candidate's feature vector is to the distribution of historical winners, accounting for correlations between features.

Candidates closest to the winner distribution receive the highest composite scores and are selected for publication. Lower distance = higher score.

At a glance
Scoring methodMahalanobis distance
Benchmark size500+ winner stocks
Model versionPhoenix v3.1
Take-profit rule+60% from entry
Stop-loss rule-20% from entry
Holding window1 week max
Pipeline
Step-by-step process

The full screening pipeline runs overnight using end-of-day data from Polygon.io.

01

Data ingestion

OHLCV data pulled from Polygon.io flat files (S3) with REST API fallback. Covers all US-listed tickers. Data is deduplicated and cleaned with incremental updates.

02

Universe filter

Hard filters: price $0.10–$5.00, float <25M shares, 10-day average volume >500,000, price >10% of 52-week high.

03

Feature engineering

Five features: 5-day momentum, volume surge, float turnover, RSI-14, range ratio. All winsorized at 1st/99th percentile and log-transformed.

04

Mahalanobis scoring

Distance computed against benchmark covariance matrix estimated using Ledoit-Wolf shrinkage.

score = 10 × (1 – percentile_rank(raw_d))
05

Ranking and publication

Top 5 by composite score published before 08:00 ET with entry price range, TP target (+60%), SL level (-20%), and model notes.

Risk framework
Exit rules
Take profit
+60%

Close position when price reaches +60% above the published entry price. Tracked to the daily high.

Stop loss
-20%

Close position when price drops -20% below entry. Protects against sharp reversal on failed setups.

Weekly expiry
5d

If neither TP nor SL is hit within 5 trading days, position closes at Friday's closing price.

Not financial advice. All content is for informational and educational purposes only. Past performance does not guarantee future results. © 2026 Phoenix Capital.