Mark Minervini’s Trend Template: 8 Criteria for Superperformance Stocks

Most traders spend their time asking “what should I buy?” when the more profitable question is “what should I not buy?” Mark Minervini’s Trend Template answers the second question with surgical precision. It is an 8-criterion checklist that any stock—or any tradable asset—must satisfy before it even qualifies for further analysis under his SEPA (Specific Entry Point Analysis) methodology. If an asset fails even one criterion, Minervini does not look at it further. The template is not a buy signal; it is a universe filter designed to eliminate everything that is trending sideways or down, so that you spend your analytical energy only on assets that have a legitimate chance of producing superperformance moves.

The problem with most explanations of the Trend Template is that they list the eight rules and stop there. The why behind each criterion is where the real insight lives. Understanding the logic transforms the checklist from a mechanical screen into a mental model you can apply flexibly—including to cryptocurrency markets where some criteria require thoughtful adaptation. This article goes through every criterion in depth, integrates Stan Weinstein’s Stage Analysis framework that underpins the whole approach, and walks through a concrete worked example so the concepts become immediately actionable.

The Foundation: Stan Weinstein’s Four Stages

Before the eight criteria make sense, you need to understand the cycle that every stock, index, or major crypto asset moves through. Stan Weinstein introduced this framework in his 1988 book Secrets for Profiting in Bull and Bear Markets, and Minervini explicitly built the Trend Template on top of it. The four stages are not random labels—they describe the structural behavior of supply and demand as institutional sponsorship accumulates, drives price, distributes, and then exits.

• Stage 1 — Basing (Neglect): Price moves sideways in a trading range after a prior decline. Volume is low and uneven. The 200-day moving average (MA) is flat or still slightly declining. Institutions are quietly accumulating but have not yet committed enough capital to drive price upward. The stock looks boring. Most retail traders ignore it. This is where patience is rewarded, but entry is premature—you have no confirmation that the basing period will resolve upward.
• Stage 2 — Advancing (Opportunity): Price breaks out of the Stage 1 base on expanding volume. The 200-day MA turns upward. Moving averages align in a bullish stack (50 above 150 above 200). This is the only stage where Minervini wants to own an asset. Superperformance moves—gains of 100%, 200%, or more in one to two years—happen almost exclusively in Stage 2. The Trend Template is designed to identify Stage 2 assets and screen out everything else.
• Stage 3 — Topping (Distribution): Price flattens again, but this time near a high rather than a low. Volume becomes churning and erratic. Institutional holders who bought in Stage 1 or early Stage 2 are distributing (selling) into the strength. The 200-day MA begins to flatten. This stage can last weeks or months, and it feels constructive right until it suddenly is not. Holding through Stage 3 gives back a large portion of Stage 2 gains.
• Stage 4 — Declining (Markdown): Price breaks below the Stage 3 base on volume. The 200-day MA turns down. Moving averages invert: the 50-day crosses below the 150-day, which crosses below the 200-day. This is the “it’s cheap now” trap that destroys capital. A stock that has fallen 50% from its high can fall another 50% from its current price. “It’s only $5” is irrelevant when the trend is down and institutional holders are still exiting.

The entire logic of the Trend Template flows from a single conviction: only buy in Stage 2, never in Stage 4. Each of the eight criteria is a specific test that filters one or more ways an asset can be failing to be in Stage 2. Understanding this maps every criterion back to a clear purpose.

Criterion 1: Price Above Both the 150-Day and 200-Day MA

This is the most elementary filter, and it eliminates a surprisingly large percentage of the market at any given time. If price is below its 150-day (approximately 30-week) or 200-day (approximately 40-week) moving average, the asset is either in Stage 3 deterioration or outright Stage 4 decline. There is no circumstance under which Minervini will consider a trade. Not “the fundamentals are great.” Not “it bounced off support.” Not “the earnings are strong.” If price is below those averages, the institutional money that drives superperformance moves has either already left or has not yet arrived in force.

The specific inclusion of the 150-day MA (which most traders ignore in favor of the 50 and 200) is deliberate. The 150-day is Minervini’s intermediate-trend gauge. It sits between the short-term 50-day and the long-term 200-day and catches situations where a stock has recovered enough to be above the 200-day but is still fighting through overhead resistance in the intermediate timeframe. A stock that clears 200 but not 150 is likely still resolving a Stage 3 base or making an early, unconfirmed Stage 1-to-2 transition. Requiring price above both eliminates those ambiguous cases.

Criterion 2: The 150-Day MA Must Be Above the 200-Day MA

Moving beyond price position, this criterion examines the relationship between the averages themselves. When the 150-day MA sits above the 200-day MA, it means that the intermediate trend is running hotter than the long-term trend—which is exactly what you expect in a healthy Stage 2 advance. The faster average pulling ahead of the slower one reflects accelerating institutional demand over the medium term.

The failure condition this criterion screens out is subtle: an asset can briefly have its price above both averages while the 150-day is still below the 200-day. This happens early in what might become a recovery or might become a dead-cat bounce in Stage 4. The moving averages themselves are lagging indicators—the 150-day needs time to accumulate enough recent price data to clear the 200-day. That delay is a feature, not a bug. It means that by the time the 150 crosses above the 200, the asset has sustained a meaningful period of strength, not just a few good days. Waiting for this alignment costs some early move, but it dramatically reduces the probability of entering a false breakout.

Criterion 3: The 200-Day MA Must Be Trending Upward for at Least One Month

This is the criterion most commonly misunderstood or glossed over. It is not enough that the 200-day MA is upward-sloping right now. It must have been trending upward for a minimum of one month. This filters out a specific and dangerous pattern: the short-term bounce that turns the 200-day MA slightly positive after a prolonged decline.

Consider an asset that spent 18 months in Stage 4. The 200-day MA has been sloping down steadily. A sharp 30% rally—common in beaten-down names—can cause the 200-day MA to flatten and even tick upward for a week or two. Criterion 3 explicitly rejects that scenario. One month of upward trend in the 200-day MA requires that the base of higher prices sustaining the average has been in place for at least 20 to 22 trading days. This means the rally is not a single surge but a sustained shift in the underlying supply/demand picture. It is the difference between a Stage 1-to-2 transition that has real momentum and one that is still fragile and likely to fail.

In practice, you can check this visually by looking at whether the 200-day MA has been consistently pointing right and slightly upward across the last four weeks of chart history. If it has been flat or pointing up for only a few days, the criterion is not satisfied.

Criterion 4: The 50-Day MA Above Both the 150-Day and 200-Day MA

This criterion completes what Minervini calls the “proper MA structure”—a full bullish stack where shorter-term averages trade above longer-term ones. The hierarchy reads: 50-day above 150-day above 200-day. When all three are aligned this way, price momentum across all three timeframes is pointing in the same direction. You have short-term, intermediate, and long-term institutional demand all simultaneously constructive.

The reason this matters operationally is volatility management. When the 50-day MA sits below the 150 or 200, the stock frequently trades in a choppy, back-and-forth pattern where it rallies above the long-term averages only to fall back below them. This is Stage 1 basing behavior. Bases are not tradeable under the SEPA framework because you cannot know in advance whether the resolution will be upward (beginning Stage 2) or downward (continuing Stage 4). The proper MA structure is one of the clearest signals that the basing period is complete and Stage 2 is underway.

Criterion 5: Current Price Above the 50-Day MA

Given that the 50-day MA must already be above the 150-day and 200-day (Criterion 4), this criterion requires price to be above its shortest major moving average. At first glance this seems redundant, but it handles a specific situation: an asset where the moving average stack is correct but price has recently pulled back below the 50-day MA during a normal consolidation.

This is actually where VCP (Volatility Contraction Pattern) entries come in—the topic covered in depth in the companion article on Minervini’s VCP pattern. A VCP forms as a stock pulls back in controlled, declining-volume contractions while the MA structure remains intact. During those pullbacks, price may dip briefly below the 50-day before recovering. Criterion 5 says: before you consider an entry, price must have recovered back above the 50-day. You are not buying the pullback while it is still ongoing; you are waiting for price to reclaim the short-term average, confirming that the pullback is over and the advance is resuming. This prevents catching falling knives even within an otherwise healthy Stage 2 trend.

Criterion 6: Price at Least 30% Above the 52-Week Low

The first five criteria deal entirely with the structure of moving averages. Criteria 6 and 7 shift to absolute price position within the 52-week range, and together they define the sweet spot in the price cycle. Criterion 6 filters out assets that are still too close to their annual lows.

Why 30%? An asset trading only 10% or 15% above its 52-week low has barely moved off the bottom. It might be very early in Stage 1 basing, or it might have bounced briefly in Stage 4 and be about to make new lows. There is no confirmation that genuine demand has entered. Thirty percent above the 52-week low means the asset has made a meaningful upward move that goes well beyond the noise of random price fluctuation. It means sellers who were happy to exit at the low have largely had their opportunity to do so. The stock has printed a sequence of higher prices that has raised the floor of the base. In Weinstein’s framework, it is evidence that Stage 2 accumulation is real rather than hypothetical.

For assets that have had multi-year declines—common in crypto bear markets—the 52-week low alone may not capture the full depth of the prior decline, but it is a practical proxy. The spirit of the criterion is: has this asset demonstrated sustained upward movement from a meaningful base? Thirty percent provides a concrete, measurable threshold.

Criterion 7: Price Within 25% of the 52-Week High

This is the criterion that surprises most new traders the most. They expect the template to tell them to buy stocks near their lows. Instead, Criterion 7 requires the asset to be near its highs—within 25% of the 52-week high. This is counterintuitive until you understand what overhead supply means.

Every seller who bought at a higher price than the current price represents potential selling pressure. They are sitting on a loss and may sell “as soon as I get back to breakeven.” In aggregate, this creates a ceiling of supply that the price must absorb and push through before it can make new highs. The farther an asset is from its 52-week high, the more overhead supply it must grind through—and the longer and more unreliable the journey becomes.

An asset within 25% of its 52-week high has already absorbed most of that overhead supply. The sellers who bought in that 25% zone have either already sold (capitulating) or are still holding and may not be motivated to sell at breakeven because they sense the trend is turning favorable. When such an asset breaks to new highs on volume, it encounters minimal resistance: everyone still holding is profitable, and the profit-taking pressure is limited because strong-hands holders tend to hold. That is precisely the environment in which superperformance moves ignite.

Criteria 6 and 7 together create a band: the asset must be at least 30% above its low and within 25% of its high. This means the asset sits in the upper portion of its annual range. It has left the base but has not yet broken out to all-time or 52-week highs—it is in the launch zone where the risk/reward of an entry is most favorable.

Criterion 8: Relative Strength Rating of 70 or Above

The final criterion shifts from absolute price behavior to relative performance. The Relative Strength (RS) rating referenced here is the Investors Business Daily (IBD) composite score that compares a stock’s 12-month price performance to all other stocks in the market, where 99 is the top percentile and 1 is the bottom. A rating of 70 means the stock has outperformed at least 70% of all stocks over the past year.

This is the “market leadership” test. Minervini does not want to own the average stock or even an above-average stock. He wants the stocks that are driving the market forward, not lagging behind it. An asset that satisfies criteria 1 through 7 but only scores a 50 RS rating is one where the price structure looks okay but the asset is not actually attracting proportionally more capital than its peers. It may eventually become a leader, but it has not proven that yet. An RS of 70 or above means money is flowing into this asset at a rate that consistently beats the majority of alternatives.

There is a secondary insight embedded in this criterion: stocks that go on to make the biggest moves often have RS ratings in the 80s or 90s before they break out. The RS rating is a useful filter not just at the buy decision but as a monitoring tool. If you hold a stock and its RS rating begins dropping despite price holding up, it means other assets are starting to outperform it—an early warning that institutional attention is shifting away.

The Full Template: Logic and Filter Summary

#	Criterion	What It Measures	What It Filters Out
1	Price above 150-day & 200-day MA	Long & intermediate trend direction	Stage 3 tops, Stage 4 declines, flat bases
2	150-day MA above 200-day MA	Intermediate momentum vs. long-term trend	Early bounces where intermediate trend is still weak
3	200-day MA trending up ≥1 month	Duration and sustainability of trend shift	Short-lived rallies that briefly flatten the 200-day
4	50-day MA above 150-day & 200-day MA	Full bullish MA stack alignment	Choppy, basing stocks not yet in confirmed Stage 2
5	Price above 50-day MA	Short-term trend continuity	Stocks mid-pullback, catching falling knives
6	Price ≥30% above 52-week low	Distance from base; breakout confirmation	Stocks too early in Stage 1 or barely off Stage 4 lows
7	Price within 25% of 52-week high	Overhead supply clearance	Assets with heavy supply overhang to work through
8	RS rating ≥70	Relative institutional sponsorship	Average performers, laggards, non-leaders

Why Buying “Cheap” in Stage 4 Is a Trap

One of the most costly mistakes retail traders make is confusing a low price with a good value. When Bitcoin fell from $69,000 to $35,000 in late 2021, many traders thought it was “cheap.” When it fell to $20,000, those same traders doubled down. When it reached $16,000, they were wiped out. The Trend Template would have rejected Bitcoin at every step of that decline: price was below the 200-day MA (Criterion 1 fail), the 150-day MA was below the 200-day MA (Criterion 2 fail), and the 200-day MA was in a sustained downtrend (Criterion 3 fail). A checklist applied mechanically would have kept you out of the entire Stage 4 decline.

The psychological trap is powerful because it exploits loss aversion and anchoring bias. We anchor to the high price and perceive the current price as a discount. But a stock that has fallen 70% needs to triple just to get back to where it was. There is no logical reason for the market to provide that triple on your timeline or at all. The Trend Template sidesteps this trap entirely by making trend direction a hard requirement, not a consideration. An asset in a downtrend is disqualified regardless of how attractive its price looks on an absolute basis.

The pattern of “fresh trend exhaustion”—covered in detail in the article on identifying trend exhaustion for entry timing—is the mirror image: recognizing when a long downtrend has genuinely exhausted selling pressure and a new Stage 2 is beginning, versus when a downtrend is merely pausing before continuing lower. The Trend Template’s one-month 200-day MA requirement is specifically designed to distinguish these two scenarios.

Applying the Trend Template to Cryptocurrency

The Trend Template was developed for equities, but its underlying logic—buy leaders in confirmed Stage 2 uptrends—applies to crypto with a few important adaptations. The moving average criteria translate directly: Bitcoin, Ethereum, and major altcoins all have 50-day, 150-day, and 200-day MAs that can be evaluated on TradingView or any charting platform. The 52-week high/low criteria apply equally. The RS criterion requires the most thoughtful adaptation.

Relative Strength in Crypto: Three Proxy Methods

In equities, RS is a percentile rank against all other stocks, compiled by IBD. In crypto, no single equivalent database exists, but you can construct meaningful proxies:

• BTC-relative performance: The most common method. If an altcoin has gained 80% over the past six months while Bitcoin has gained 40%, the altcoin’s BTC-relative RS is strong. Chart the altcoin in its BTC pair (e.g., ETHBTC, SOLBTC) and apply the Trend Template to that pair directly. A coin whose BTC pair satisfies the Trend Template is outperforming the dominant asset in the space.
• Total crypto market cap relative: Compare the asset’s performance against the total crypto market cap (TOTAL on TradingView). This accounts for periods when Bitcoin dominance shifts and altcoins diverge from BTC pricing.
• Cross-asset percentile: Manually or via screener, compare the 3-month or 6-month performance of a shortlist of top-100 coins and evaluate which coins are in the top 30% of performers. This is rough but practically useful.

The crypto market adds one additional complexity: correlation clustering. In a risk-off environment, virtually all altcoins decline together regardless of their individual fundamentals. This makes the Trend Template more powerful as a filter but requires awareness of Bitcoin’s own macro stage. If Bitcoin itself is in Stage 4, almost no altcoin will satisfy the Trend Template because Bitcoin’s downtrend drags the entire market. The correct response is not to loosen the criteria—it is to wait. Market-wide Stage 4 environments in crypto have been some of the most destructive capital destroyers in financial history for traders who refused to sit in cash.

For insights into how smart money flows behave across different market environments, including how institutional crypto positioning differs from equity market dynamics, the structural logic overlaps significantly with the Trend Template’s emphasis on trend confirmation before entry.

Worked Example: Applying the Trend Template

Let’s work through a hypothetical but realistic example to make the criteria concrete. Imagine Asset X (a mid-cap technology stock or large-cap altcoin) with the following data at the time of evaluation:

Data Point	Value	Criterion Tested	Pass / Fail
Current price	$185	1, 5, 6, 7	—
150-day MA	$162	1, 2	—
200-day MA	$148	1, 2, 3	—
50-day MA	$174	4, 5	—
200-day MA slope (past month)	+0.4% per week	3	—
52-week low	$110	6	—
52-week high	$220	7	—
RS rating	82	8	—

Now evaluating each criterion:

• Criterion 1: $185 > $162 (150-day) and $185 > $148 (200-day). Pass.
• Criterion 2: $162 (150-day) > $148 (200-day). Pass.
• Criterion 3: 200-day MA has been rising at roughly 0.4% per week for the past month, indicating a consistent upward slope. Pass.
• Criterion 4: 50-day at $174 > 150-day at $162 > 200-day at $148. Full bullish stack. Pass.
• Criterion 5: $185 > $174 (50-day). Pass.
• Criterion 6: ($185 − $110) ÷ $110 = 68.2% above 52-week low. Requirement is ≥30%. Pass.
• Criterion 7: ($220 − $185) ÷ $220 = 15.9% below 52-week high. Requirement is within 25%. Pass.
• Criterion 8: RS rating of 82, above the 70 threshold. Pass.

Asset X passes all eight criteria. It is a Trend Template-qualified candidate and eligible for SEPA entry analysis. The next step—which the Trend Template alone does not tell you—is identifying the specific entry point. That is where the VCP pattern and pivot point analysis take over, detailed in the companion article on Minervini’s VCP and entry technique.

Now consider a variation: everything is the same, but the 200-day MA is at $192, putting price below the 200-day MA at $185. Criteria 1, 2, 4, and 5 all fail immediately. The asset is not even close to qualifying. Or imagine RS drops to 55—Criterion 8 fails alone, and the asset is disqualified regardless of its moving average structure. The template is an all-or-nothing filter.

The Trend Template and Risk Management: Before You Enter, Know Your R

Passing the Trend Template is a necessary condition for a SEPA trade, not a sufficient one. Minervini is emphatic about this in both Trade Like a Stock Market Wizard and Think & Trade Like a Champion: even template-qualified stocks can lose money. What separates winning traders from losing traders over a large sample of trades is not the win rate alone—it is the relationship between average winner size and average loser size.

This is where risk/reward analysis becomes non-negotiable. Every Trend Template-qualified entry has a pivot point (the entry price), a stop-loss level (typically just below the base or the most recent significant low within the pattern), and a profit target range derived from the prior base depth, chart structure, and overall market conditions. Before sizing any position, you need to know:

• What is the distance from entry to stop in percentage terms? (This determines maximum position size for a given dollar risk.)
• What is the projected target relative to that stop? (A 1:3 risk/reward means you can be right only 33% of the time and still be profitable in expectation.)
• What win rate do you realistically need given your target R multiple to be net profitable? (A 2:1 R:R requires you to win more than 33% of trades; a 3:1 R:R requires only 25%.)

For the full treatment of how SEPA integrates position sizing with the Trend Template filter, see the companion article on Minervini’s SEPA risk management. And for how these principles connect to the broader landscape of what great traders across different eras have in common, the pillar piece on principles common to all trading legends draws the thread connecting Minervini, Weinstein, Livermore, and others.

Common Mistakes When Applying the Trend Template

Even traders who know the eight criteria make consistent errors in application. The most common ones are worth addressing explicitly.

Mistake 1: Checking the Template Only on Entry Day

The Trend Template should be checked continuously as a monitoring tool, not just at the point of entry. A stock that passes all eight criteria on Monday might violate Criterion 5 (price below 50-day) by Thursday if it has a sharp pullback. This does not necessarily mean selling immediately—it depends on whether the broader MA structure remains intact—but it is a signal that the trade is under stress and demands attention. Ignoring the template post-entry is how traders hold through a Stage 2-to-Stage 3 transition without recognizing it.

Mistake 2: Applying the Template to Weekly or Monthly Charts Without Adjustment

The Trend Template was designed for daily charts. The 150-day and 200-day MAs are daily MAs. If you apply the criteria to a weekly chart (where the equivalents would be approximately 30-week and 40-week MAs), the math changes but the logic remains the same. The problem arises when traders mix timeframes—checking the daily MA structure but using weekly price levels for the 52-week high/low criteria. Keep everything on the same timeframe for consistency.

Mistake 3: Treating the Template as a Buy Signal

The template qualifies an asset for analysis; it does not tell you when to buy. An asset can satisfy all eight criteria for months while forming a VCP or an extended Stage 2 base without offering a low-risk entry. Buying an asset simply because it is template-qualified—without identifying a specific pivot point with a defined stop-loss—forces you to accept a wide and undefined risk. The template narrows the universe; the VCP entry narrows the timing. Both are necessary.

Mistake 4: Abandoning the Template During Market Corrections

When the broader market corrects, many template-qualified stocks temporarily violate Criterion 5 (price below 50-day) or even Criterion 1 (price below 150-day) because the entire market is pulling back. This does not mean these stocks have become Stage 4 declines. It means a market correction is creating noise. The way to handle this is to monitor whether the overall MA structure (criteria 2, 3, and 4) remains intact. If the 150-day is still above the 200-day, the 200-day is still trending up, and the 50-day stack is still roughly aligned—and the broader market is simply pulling back—the stock has not changed its fundamental character. Patience during corrections is a feature of the SEPA framework, not a bug.

Integrating the Trend Template into a Daily Screening Workflow

In practice, most serious equity traders using SEPA build a screening workflow that applies the Trend Template as a first-pass filter to reduce a universe of thousands of stocks to a manageable watchlist of dozens. The workflow typically looks like:

• Weekly scan: Run an automated screener (Finviz, IBD, TC2000, or similar) filtering for all eight criteria. This produces a raw list of candidates, often 50 to 200 names depending on market conditions.
• Chart review: Manually review each candidate’s chart to assess the quality of the base, look for VCP patterns, evaluate volume behavior, and identify potential pivot points.
• Watchlist construction: Narrow to the 10 to 30 best setups—those with the tightest, most controlled bases and the highest RS ratings.
• Entry monitoring: Watch watchlist stocks daily for volume-confirmed breakouts above pivot points.
• Post-entry management: Continue applying the template as a monitoring tool to catch deterioration early.

For crypto, the same logic applies with a smaller universe. Limit the scan to the top 100 or 200 coins by market cap, apply the template to each, and review charts manually for those that qualify. Given crypto’s higher volatility, the moving average periods often need to be recalibrated—some crypto traders use 50-day, 100-day, and 150-day MAs rather than 50/150/200, reflecting crypto’s compressed cycle lengths relative to equities.