Creating Your Watchlist
By Dave Mabe
Even if you're a discretionary trader, you're almost certainly using a lot of automation already.
Otherwise, you'd have 2000 charts spread across your monitor to watch for patterns across all the symbols.
To get more systematic from where you are now, just lean in a little.
The first thing to think about is how you're even deciding what symbol to put on your chart at all.
You likely have some kind of scanner to even decide which symbols to look at.
A large part of that filtering is just figuring out what symbols NOT to look at.
For example, let's say you're looking at a Trade-Ideas alert window of new highs.
You've filtered it for minimum average volume (which lets you ignore a lot of garbage) and other criteria.
When alerts come in, you eyeball the chart to see if it's something you're interested in trading.
If you can rule it out, you ignore it and wait for the next alert.
But consider this...
What if your alert window was so tightly filtered that when an alert arrives, you knew it was actionable?
You don't waste any brainpower deciding.
You don't get distracted from whatever you're in the middle of by an event you won't do anything about anyway.
Think about how much your life gets better by NOT looking at spurious alerts that don't matter.
You become much more efficient, freeing up your attention to focus on more important things (like new strategy ideas) instead of loading a chart and watching it, only to do nothing about it because "I'm a trader and I have to look at charts all day."
If you're using Trade-Ideas, the history feature is great for this because you can dial in your alerts outside of market hours.
Start by reviewing the alerts you received and selecting criteria for removing them - maybe relative volume needs to be higher, maybe the position in the daily range needs to be more extreme - whatever.
Your goal is to dial in that window so that everything that comes into it is high priority.
Because you don't have 2000 charts on your screen, you're already doing this on some level.
Just keep going.
-Dave
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