Using TradeStops the first few times can be overwhelming. Here’s a quick guide to the TradeStops research tools and how to get started using them.
As a TradeStops member, you understand the value of using the research tools to help with your investing. Yes, the Help button on the upper right-hand side can take you to the TradeStops Knowledge Base, but that can be difficult to navigate if you’re not familiar with it.
We also send out “Product Tip” emails each week that cover specific areas of the TradeStops website. Be sure to read these.
But until now, we’ve never put together a single document that covers all of the basics of the research tools. We’ll also be covering this in our webinar on Wednesday, February 7th. You can register for it here.
Let’s get started.
The research tools are located at the top of the TradeStops page. Click on the “Research” tab, and it opens the different tools that are available. The “Stock Analyzer” is the first tool on the left. For what it’s worth, I go to this page more than any of the others.
Just type in the stock or fund you want to analyze and then click the green “Analyze” button. When looking up a stock, you can usually ignore the “Entry Date” and leave the current date as the default. However, if you’re looking up a stock that you already own, you might want to put the date that you bought the stock in that box. This will help you see if you’re profitable and by how much.
Let’s look at Nvidia (NVDA). The top half of the screen shows you the Volatility Quotient (VQ), the Stock State Indicator (SSI) status, the most recent close, and the change in price. It also shows you the various stop loss strategies based on the stock price and the stock’s volatility. This gives you a great visual as to how much risk is in each stop loss strategy.
The bottom half of the screen shows you the stock movement over most any period of time that you want. I like to start looking at the one-year chart and then look at longer periods of time.
You can adjust the chart to show what’s of most interest to you. I recommend you play around with this – click the different settings on and off, and see what works for you. Don’t worry, you can’t break the program. Take a few minutes and give it a try.
The next tool is the “Position Size Calculator.” This tool performs two related functions. Based on your input, it tells you:
- How many shares of a stock you can buy using a set amount of risk; or
- How much risk you’re taking with a set amount of shares
Here’s an example of how many shares we can buy of NVDA if we want to take $1000 of risk.
Press the “Calculate” button and here are the results. You can buy 15 shares of NVDA to take $1000 of normal risk.
What if we want to invest $10,000 into NVDA? How much risk would we be taking? Just change a couple of the inputs and it’s easy to find out.
Click the “Calculate” button and you can see that you’re taking almost $2650 of risk in the position.
The Pure Quant tool is the next of the research tools. This tool, available to Lifetime members, allows you to build a portfolio based on the rules that TradeSmith and his research team have developed.
For instance, you could take the stocks that Warren Buffett owns and build a portfolio from those stocks. TradeStops will pick the best ones to own right now. Once you’ve decided on your parameters (portfolio size and number of positions), just click the green “Run Research” button, and the results will appear.
The next research tool is the “Asset Allocation” tool. This gives you a great visual that shows you the diversification you have in a single portfolio or all of your portfolios by either sector diversification or industry diversification.
You can click on any of the “pie” slices and see the stocks in that specific sector. In this example, Wal-Mart (WMT) and Coca Cola (KO) are the two stocks in the Consumer Staples sector.
Our next research tool is the “PVQ Analyzer.” PVQ stands for Portfolio Volatility Quotient. This tool measures the normal volatility of your overall portfolio. It accomplishes this by looking at how the stocks in your portfolio are correlated.
This pie chart shows you the allocation among Low Risk, Medium Risk, High Risk, and Sky-High Risk stocks. For most people, the lower the PVQ, the less risk they’re taking with their overall portfolio.
As with the Asset Allocation tool, click one of the slices, and you can see the stocks in that classification. In this portfolio, the stocks considered Low Risk include, WMT, KO, Visa (V), and Pfizer (PFE).
The final tool in TradeStops Research is the “Risk Rebalancer.” This tool, available to Premium and Lifetime members, takes the stocks in one or more of your portfolios and automatically rebalances them so that there’s the same amount of dollar risk in each position.
Just select one or more of your portfolios and then click on the green “Rebalance” button. There are 3 tabs that show you the results of the rebalance. The first tab shows you the effect on your overall portfolio.
The second tab shows you the results of investment changes on the individual stocks. It will take a few minutes to understand everything that’s being presented, but it’s not difficult.
And the third tab shows you the steps you’d take with each of the stocks to implement the results of the rebalancing.
We’ve written a lot about the Risk Rebalancer. Here’s a good place to go if you want to know more – Click here.
Again, don’t hesitate to practice with these tools. The more you use them, the easier it will be for you to be successful using TradeStops.
Cheers,
Tom Meyer
Research and Education Specialist
