Have you ever watched a stock go through the roof and thought to yourself, “If only I had found that stock before it took off!”? We've all been there, some of us more often than we'd like. The truth is, no matter what the overall market is doing, there are always strong stocks out there making interesting moves, whether they're climbing to new highs or showing pivotal crossovers.

The trouble is, with thousands of stocks and funds to choose from, finding the best candidates can be virtually impossible. You are missing these opportunities because you simply don't know they exist.

Well, with a little bit of work on your part, the StockCharts Scan Engine can help - often in very profitable ways.

The StockCharts Scan Engine takes any specific technical criteria you're interested in, searches the many thousands of symbols in our database and returns the stocks or funds that meet your exact parameters. It processes and filters a vast amount of price data in order to provide you with charts that meet your unique technical interests. Those results can then be displayed in a variety of formats for further analysis.

Creating scans takes a bit of learning and practice. Once you get the hang of it, though, the scan engine will help you consistently find great charts and promising new opportunities with ease. There are a few levels of scanning to choose from:

The easiest place to start with scans is our Predefined Scans page, which includes an extensive collection of popular scans for you to browse and explore. Find the scan that sounds like a good match for what you're looking for, then click on it to see the latest results. If you're looking for simple things like “New 52-week Highs” or “Strong Volume Gainers”, this is a perfect place to go!

Next up is our Standard Scan Workbench, which allows you to quickly create simple technical scans via dropdown menus. If you'd like to try creating some customized scans with your own unique parameters, this is a great jumping off point.

As you become more familiar with the scan engine and start to come up with more of your own technical criteria for new scans, our Advanced Scan Workbench allows you to create highly-customized scans using more complex technical criteria. This is one of the most powerful features of StockCharts, and one of our most widely used. Once you get the hang of it, the Advanced Scan Workbench will quickly become your go-to resource for discovering new stocks or funds.

All three of these resources can be accessed from the Member Tools panel of Your Dashboard, located in the top left side of the page. To head there now, click here.

For detailed instructions on how to create and run your own custom technical scans, click here.

Once you've created a custom technical scan, you can save it to your account for future use. To do so, use the “Save As” button towards the bottom of the scanning workbench. Once saved, your scan will appear on Your Dashboard, in the section titled “Your Saved Scans”. When you select one of your custom scans from the dropdown menu, you'll have two options: run the scan and see what results it returns, or edit the scan to adjust its technical criteria.

If you choose to edit a saved scan, you'll do so from the scan workbench. Make any changes you'd like, then click “Save” in the options list at the bottom of the workbench. If you'd like to save your edited scan under a different name, you can do so by clicking “Save As”.

For more in-depth details about our advanced technical scanning features, we strongly encourage you to check out our instructional video series on scanning. These helpful videos will help you better understand exactly how to set up and use the scan engine, one of our most powerful members-only features. Click here to watch now.

Next Up » Part 6: Setting Up Custom Alerts to Stay on Top of Key Market Moves