KALMATThe Coil — the volatility-contraction screen
Every liquid Indian stock, checked after every close for a base that is quietly tightening.
What the screen finds
The Coil looks for stocks resting in a price base whose swings are contracting in stages. The first pullback inside the pattern might give back 15%, the next 8%, the next 4%; by the end the stock is trading in a range of a few percent, on volume noticeably lighter than its own normal, just under a well-defined ceiling. Chart readers know this shape as the volatility contraction pattern — VCP. KALMAT measures it mechanically rather than by eye: base length in weeks, the depth of each successive contraction, how far volume has dried up, and the exact pivot price the pattern sits under.
The market logic
A base tightens for one main reason: sellers are running out. Every holder who wanted to exit near the old high has had weeks of chances to do so. Each pullback is shallower than the last because there is less impatient supply left to absorb, and volume dries up because the people still holding have decided not to sell at these prices. When the range narrows to almost nothing just below the ceiling, the stock has reached a quiet agreement about its price — and from that agreement, even modest new demand is enough to push it to new highs. That push, on expanding volume, is the breakout. The pattern is an observation about supply, not a prophecy about direction.
How to read the output
Each row in the screen shows the base length, how tight the final contraction is, the pivot, how far the last close sits below it, and the stock’s relative-strength rank against the whole market. A stock on this list is a candidate under watch, nothing more: the screen surfaces the setup, and only a close above the pivot on clearly expanded volume turns a setup into an event. What that day should look like — and what a low-volume poke or a squat back into the base means — is covered in the guide to bases and the four patterns.
Tightness is relative, so compare within the list rather than against an absolute number: a final contraction of 4% in a stock that normally swings 3% a day is a different creature from the same 4% in a placid large-cap. The columns are there to be sorted and weighed against each other, not obeyed one row at a time.
Honest limits
Tight bases fail, regularly. A coil in a weak overall market resolves downward more often than upward, which is why the market-health dial sits next to every screen. The scan reads price and volume only — it does not know about earnings dates, news, or who owns the float, and it never will; those are context you bring, not signals it gives. Some coils simply keep coiling for months. The counts published each day are observations from the record after that close, not predictions, and past pattern behaviour does not promise future results.
KALMAT Screener is educational. It is not SEBI-registered and nothing on this page is investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security.