TradeStops makes it easy to manage your portfolios. Some of you are able to synchronize your portfolios, but many of you have to manually enter your trades. This article will help you understand the process and get a head start.
To create a manual portfolio, just click on the “Portfolios” tab at the top of any page. You can also click on the “Create Portfolios” circle on the “Welcome” page.
This will open the “Add Portfolio” window. Be sure to click on the “Manual” tab to get started. For this example, we’ll create an Investment Portfolio and title it “THM Portfolio.”
What’s the difference between an “Investment” portfolio and a “Watch” portfolio? In the way that they work…nothing. They both are updated at the same times and send you the same alerts. We created these two designations to help you separate actual investment portfolios from portfolios of stocks and funds you’re watching, but don’t actually own. We recommend that you organize your portfolios this way so that your actual investments are in “Investment” portfolios and the stocks that you’re watching are in “Watch” portfolios. This will be important when you use the Risk Rebalancer and want to get a good overview of all of your portfolios combined.
The only investment information that we’ll add at this time is the amount of cash that’s in the portfolio. In this case, we’ll start with $1000.00. Here’s what this looks like after we save the portfolio.
Now that we’ve created the THM Portfolio, let’s add our stocks to it. That’s easy to do as well. Find the THM Portfolio under the “Portfolio” tab, and click on it. Then, click on the green “Add Position” button.
We’ll add the first stock here. We bought JP Morgan Chase (JPM) in 2015. It’s important that the date and the entry price are correct, not only so you can see your profit or loss, but also so TradeStops can keep track of your recieved dividends. This is an important part of the TradeStops service.
But the most important part of TradeStops is that we give you the ability to manage the positions in your portfolios. The last data point that we enter is the type of alert for each stock that we enter.
The Stock State Indicator alert is our most advanced alert as it actually acts as five alerts in one. This will tell you when your stock has triggered an SSI Entry signal and is in the Green Zone, when it has triggered an SSI Stop signal and is in the Red Zone, as well as moves into the Yellow Zone. There is more information in the Help Center about the different types of Alerts that are available.
The first few stocks might take a minute or two each to enter, but after that, it should be very easy. Our guess is that you can enter twenty positions in your portfolio in less than 20 minutes.
And this is what it looks like after we’re finished entering our positions.
We recommend that you practice creating Manual portfolios. As you become proficient, you’ll see that you can set up many Manual portfolios, each of which allows you to easily track dozens of stocks. Each portfolio can follow a different sector, industry, or investment newsletter. The choice is yours.
Tom Meyer
Member Services
