It can be overwhelming, especially for new members, to log in to the TradeStops site and see all the different tabs, each of which dives deeply into separate areas of knowledge.
Most members want to get right into the program and import their own investment portfolios. That makes sense; you want to see the Volatility Quotient (VQ) and the Stock State Indicators (SSI) for the positions that you own. But sometimes, knowing the VQ and SSI status of only what you own can limit your ability to use the various tools available to make better decisions about your portfolio holdings.
But there’s one area of TradeStops that you might be missing or not using enough — one that could help you become much more proficient with using TradeStops to “make more and risk less” — Watch-Only portfolios.
Watch portfolios can let you experiment and learn more about TradeStops without making any changes to your current investment positions.
Having one or more Watch portfolios allows you to create “what-if” scenarios. For instance, you could duplicate your current investment portfolio and see what adding an additional stock or two would do to its Asset Allocation or Portfolio Volatility Quotient (PVQ).
With several different Watch portfolios set up, it becomes easy to practice using the more advanced tools such as the Risk Rebalancer and Pure Quant.
If you have newsletter subscriptions that you want to save and follow, or you want to keep an eye on one of the Billionaire’s portfolios, you can do that using Watch portfolios.
Let’s get started.
If you’ve never created a Watch portfolio, you can use these step-by-step instructions.
Start out by clicking on the “Portfolios” tab at the top of the TradeStops site. Next, click on the green “Add Portfolio” button. This will open up a separate “Add A Portfolio” window.
Click on the middle “Add Manually” tab and then click on the dropdown menu that says “Type” and be sure it’s “Watch Only. ” You’ll most likely want to track in U.S. Dollars.
For this example, we’re going to set up a Watch portfolio of precious metals stocks. We’ve also added that to the “Notes” section, but that’s optional. We like to be as descriptive as possible when we name the portfolio.
Once you’ve set up this portfolio, click on the green “Save” button. This will take you back to the “Portfolios” page. Be sure to click on the “Watch Only” tab and then click on the “Precious Metals” portfolio. It will open up to a blank screen.
As you can guess, the goal of the portfolio is to know the state of the precious metals. We’ll add the ETFs for gold, silver, the gold miners and the junior gold miners. Let’s start out by adding GLD, the ETF that tracks the price of gold.
Click on the green “Add Position” button. It opens up a separate window and we can add the position:
- Select “Stock” as the “Type. ” (This is the default selection.)
- Type in the symbol “GLD.”
- Click on the “Entry Date” and then click on the date you’d like. We’re using the closing price from 10/19/2018.
- The “Entry Price” should automatically fill in with the correct price. Click on “Get Quote” just to be sure.
- Since this is a Watch portfolio and not an actual investment portfolio, we only need to have 1 share of GLD to get the current VQ and SSI signals.
- Select the “Long” box; this is the default selection.
- In the last section, under “Alerts,” we want to be sure the “Stock State Indicator (SSI)” is selected.
- Click the green “Save and Close” button.
We’ve added our first position to the Watch portfolio.
Now let’s finish the portfolio. Using the same steps as above, add the following ETFs:
- SLV (silver)
- GDX (gold miners)
- GDXJ (junior gold miners)
Here’s another Watch portfolio that we like to follow. It uses the ETFs that follow the different S&P 500 sectors. We’ve named this portfolio “Sector ETFs.”
Cheers,
Tom Meyer
Education and Research Specialist, TradeStops
