, Educational

Portfolio Management at Mid-Year

June 24, 2019 / by TradeSmith Education

In a recent article, TradeSmith focused on the necessity for investors to stay ready during periods of lower market volatility so that during periods of increased volatility, you can focus on executing your investment strategy without the noise and distractions that are exacerbated during volatile markets.

What do we mean by staying ready? It means that we know the investment strategy for each of our portfolios (different portfolios can have different investment strategies). It means that we have our Investment portfolios updated with the correct alerts. It also means that our Watch portfolios are updated with the proper holdings as well as the proper alerts.

Before we go any further, I want you to know that not staying up-to-date is really easy, especially if you have a lot of accounts and Watch portfolios. We’re all busy and have many things going on. It can be really easy to not be up-to-date with the positions and alerts. Full disclosure: I’m in this same situation as well, but now I’m going to take the time necessary to rectify it.

For my situation, there are three things I’d like to accomplish:

Make sure that my alert settings are what I want to receive in the TradeStops “Settings” page
Check that positions in my Watch portfolios are updated properly
Make sure that the alerts for the portfolios are in place

Longtime readers know that I use a lot of Watch portfolios to keep track of sector conditions and the individual stocks within each sector. We’ll focus on these for this update.

To be sure that your alert settings are correct, go to the “Settings” link in the upper-right hand corner of the website.

Click on the “Alerts” tab and be sure that they’re set up the way you want them. As a reminder, you can now choose to consolidate your alerts into a single email, four separate emails, or individual alerts. You’ll find this option under this tab.

Next, let’s go to one of my Watch portfolios. This one holds the top 10 holdings of the Energy Select Sector ETF. I’ve titled the portfolio XLE, which is the ticker symbol of the ETF itself.

This is what I currently have as the top 10 holdings. You’ll also notice that I don’t have any alerts set up for these positions.

To check if these are still the top 10 holdings, I’ll go to the website of the ETF sponsor and check the current holdings.

It turns out that my list isn’t completely accurate. I have Valero (VLO) as one of the top 10, but it’s not currently in the top 10 holdings of XLE. I don’t have Anadarko Petroleum (APC) in my list so I’ll make these changes. Here’s the updated list of the top 10 holdings in the XLE Watch portfolio.

Lastly, let’s add Stock State Indicator (SSI) alerts to these stocks. It’s easy to do it in bulk. Just check the top box right underneath the green “Add Position” button. Checking the top box will highlight all of the positions.

From here, click on the green “Add Alert” box and a separate box will pop-up. Click on the “Add” button and this will set SSI alerts for all 10 positions.