Relative strength vs the Nifty: the Weinstein ingredient most screeners skip
Weinstein wanted stocks rising faster than the market, not just rising. The second pillar of his method, and how we measure it.
Ask most people to name Weinstein's method and they'll say "the four stages." But his framework has a second pillar that far fewer screeners bother to implement: relative strength versus the index. Weinstein wanted stocks that were not just rising, but rising faster than the market. Absolute strength can be borrowed from a rising tide; relative strength is what's left when you subtract the tide out.
It matters because cross-sectional relative strength — how a stock performs against its peers and the index — is one of the best-documented effects in all of finance. If any single ingredient we don't yet score were going to turn out to carry real information, this is the most likely candidate. So we've started measuring it properly.
Simple RS vs Mansfield RS
The plain version is straightforward: take the stock's return over a window (say three, six or twelve months) and subtract the Nifty's return over the same window. Positive means the stock beat the index; negative means it lagged. It answers "did this stock outperform?" in one number.
Weinstein used a more refined version, Mansfield relative strength, which measures whether the stock's relative line is itself trending up — that is, whether the outperformance is improving rather than merely positive. A stock can be beating the index while its edge quietly shrinks; Mansfield RS catches that. It's the better tool, and it's on our list to build if the simple version earns its place.
How we're handling it — honestly
We compute RS versus the Nifty over 3, 6 and 12 months using our own index price history, and we've added it as a measured-only candidate: it is displayed and tracked, but it does not yet influence any verdict. That distinction is deliberate. We don't add an ingredient to the scoring until our own data shows it carries information — and that measurement needs roughly sixty trading days of clean history before it can say anything, which points to around September 2026 before we'll know.
Why "measured-only" and not "shipped"
It would be easy to bolt relative strength onto the score today and claim an upgrade — it's a respected factor, after all. But respected-in-general and works-in-our-data are different claims, and conflating them is how scanners accumulate untested rules. We register it, measure it, and let the evidence decide.
Key takeaways
- Relative strength — performance versus the index — is the second pillar of Weinstein's method.
- Cross-sectional relative strength is one of the best-documented effects in finance.
- Simple RS = stock return minus index return; Mansfield RS asks whether that edge is improving.
- We compute RS vs Nifty over 3/6/12 months from our own index history.
- It's a measured-only candidate — tracked, not yet scored — until the data earns it (~Sept 2026).
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Browse today's scan →This guide is educational and explains how StockLearn interprets common technical indicators, using illustrative examples. It is not investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security.