Sure, this is what I did a long time ago when I traded stocks actively intra-day. At the prop firm where I use to trade we use to focus on listed stocks and specifically mid cap stocks. Say MGM was due to report earnings today. That stock was going to be messy. One of my favorite stocks at the time was IGT. They made the slot machines that went into casinos. Nobody was watching IGT, they were watching MGM. MGM would report a strong EPS report and IGT would fly. Let's say on an AVG day IGT had a 1.50 range. Today it would move 5 pts in a straight line on the back of MGM's numbers. It was easy money and nobody was in it. We did this everyday. We look at any stock that either had earnings, earnings revisions, or any event that materially affected their earnings (not up/downgrades) and then looked for names that would be impacted by that news, not the main stock, maybe it's suppliers, it's customers, it's competitors, etc.
It took me a long time to learn this. When I joined the firm and before I was in a group I would simply scan the market for the most volatile stocks and day after day I would get killed. Once I joined my group my mentor showed me the value of hard work. Anyone idiot can scan for volatile stocks, even back in 2000 all it took was 10 seconds. The hard part was doing your research and looking for the more nuanced names. Once I found these names they were so much easier to trade. Very little noise, lot's of movement and very easy to read the tape.
The stuff that everyone trades is messy. Oh sure they move all right, all over the f*cking place. How does that make them tradeable unless you think you can extract alpha from a random noise process. So is this easy? Good Lord no. If it was everyone would do it. Most the guys were lazy and ran simple scans in a minute or two and jumped right in. Buying..selling...selling...buying, getting stopped out over and over. Breaking their monitors, throwing them across the room. Yeah, those were the good old days. In my trading room you could hear a pin drop. It was very quiet, we were very focused.