By keeping an eye on these stocks, you can make informed decisions about when to buy or sell, based on market conditions, company news, and other factors during the week.

In this blog, we will cover the steps you need to take to build a winning stock watch list, and some crucial mistakes to avoid:

Mistakes To AVOID When Building A Watch List

Following Random Setups & Posts

Whenever you see a stock or setup blowing up on twitter, social media, chatrooms, or hitting a major scan, it’s already too late. The biggest mistake new traders make when building their watch list is trying to save time by adding other people’s ideas and setups to their own watchlist, and not doing the work themselves.

When you first start out, building a watchlist will take time. Don’t cut corners. You need to be watching stocks that fit YOUR game plan. It’s fine to look at what other people are watching, I’m sure many of you read our nightly watch list. Use these for ideas, NOT for blindly following. 

Follow this guide, take time every night, and learn to build an effective watchlist on your own. 

Adding Too Much To Your Watchlist

You want your list to be ACTIONABLE. Quality over quantity, especially when you’re new. Every ticker on your list should have some sort of highly-probable, actionable setup coming up in the near-term. Adding tons of tickers to your watchlist that just look ‘alright’ will be highly distracting, and will cause you to miss the actual A+ setups you were seeking out in the first place.

If you don’t have a list of set ups that you know you perform well on, we recommend you go back to the basics. We teach 18 different day trading and swing trading strategies in our Live Trading Boot Camp so you know what set ups you perform well on, and as a result what stocks to put on your watch list.

What Softwares To Use When Building Your Watch List?

In the video below, Kunal breaks down how he uses TC2000 to build his watch list, and incorporates several scans and lists into his process. TC2000 is a great charting platform and software to trade off of, and plan due to its easy to use interface. Kunal Desai is a veteran day trader with over 15 years of experience, and has simple routine you can learn from in the video below:

If you don’t want to use TC2000 though, you can easily use other software programs and websites like Finviz.com and TradingView.com to run scans and filter down stocks by certain setups and criteria to add to your watchlist. 

Types of Stocks To Look For & Scans To Run

Stocks That Have Big Momentum

First off, when we are scanning through different stocks and lists, we want to find stocks that are starting to have big momentum along some sort of trend. Look for stocks that have broke through a massive range to the upside on volume for example, or are about to break out. Or vice-versa to the downside for short-selling. We want to be where the activity is, and this will help you. Right before the market opens, you should be running a liquid gainers scan, a simple scan that filters stocks that are gapping up or down 4% or more 1M minimum average volume:

Stocks Coming Out of a Pattern

Usually you have 3-6 days AFTER a stock breaks a pattern to trade it before it becomes too extended. Take $MARA for example below.

$MARA broke the long downtrend on extremely high relative volume. You basically had 6 days of clean upside activity after the trend broke before you had a condensing of the range, and a big reversal candle.

Look for stocks coming out of big patterns, set alerts at key levels, and add them to your watch list so you’re ready to jump in once they set up.

Flagging or Range-Bound Stocks

Looking for stocks that are coiling right now on their longer term time frames like their daily chart is great to add to your list. Look for stocks that are just getting ready to break a huge range to the upside or downside, or a flag to the upside or downside. You can actually set alerts on your charts in TC2000 for that certain level to break, which will help you a ton with not missing these moves.

 $CCL is a great recent example of this type of price action:

Go-To Stocks

In addition to all of the new lists I am building, I also like to keep a list of my go-to stocks by my side. These are stocks that have big range, high volume, are well-known, and have a high ATR (learn more about ATR here). These stocks usually give rise to solid opportunities a few times per week, and are great to keep on a revolving list to analyze. 

How To Analyze Indices

Whenever we are building a watchlist, it is important to look at the major indices like the Russel 2000, $SPY/@ES, and $QQQ/@NQ to get a solid gauge on what the overall market conditions are.

If we are trending downwards, it is a good idea to look for shorts or over-extended bounce plays to the upside. If the market and indices are trending upwards, it is a good idea to do the opposite: look for longs or over-extended short setups. Use the indices as market color to aid in your bias going into the week.

If you want to learn more strategies and tactics to use to dominate the 2023 market conditions, make sure to apply for our LIVE Trading Boot Camp below!

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The post Step-By-Step Guide For Building a WINNING Stock Watch List appeared first on Bulls on Wall Street.

Nope. Many traders mistakenly think having a big watch list means they will be more likely to find more winning trades. This is the opposite of what happens.

Every successful trader I know has a narrow, focused watchlist of usually just 10-20 names (sometimes less) going into the trading day.

Today we will give you a step-by-step guide for building a watch list:

Pre-Market Scans

This is something new traders often miss: You should be running scans twice before the trading day starts.

In addition to running scans the night before, you need to do it pre-market, before the market opens at 9:30 EST. Stocks will often have press releases where news that comes out during pre-market trading.

Trade-ideas is a solid scanning software to use. You can also use free sites like https://marketchameleon.com/ or thestockmarketwatch.com to see a list of stocks gapping up and down during pre-market trading (you can use them for after-hours scans also). All you have to do is select the pre-market tab on those sites and you will see most (not all) of the stocks gapping up and down during pre-market.

End of Day Scans

Many of the stocks that you trade the next trading today were “in play” the day before. This is why we always run nightly scans to get a full analysis of all the stocks that made significant moves that day. The type of scans you run will depend on your trading style. A good basic scan to get you started is what we call a “Liquid Gainers/Losers” scan. You don’t even have to use a paid scanner to run this.

All you do is filter by average daily volume and percentage gainers/losers. The change should be +/- 4%, and the average daily volume should be over 500k. It is also useful to filter by stock’s float size and relative volume. Low float stocks on high relative volume are the most explosive.

You can do all of this using Finviz’s screener.  This will give you a good 50-100 stocks to sift through from the trading day. You want to run these scans at 8 PM when after-hours trading has concluded.

Quality, Not Quantity: Narrow Your Watch List

You only want to be watching high-quality setups. The best setups are obvious. If it takes you more than 10 seconds to figure if a stock’s daily chart is hot or not, it’s not a high-quality setup.

Stocks should be some of your go-to setups. Not some other trader you follow on Twitter. It is crucial that you focus on stocks that are in your niche.

Half of the battle of becoming a successful trader is knowing what tickers and setups to avoid because you have no edge. Narrowing down your watch list to 10 names will give you a lot more focus and direction in your trading day. But your work is not done yet.

Look Through Every Daily Chart On Your Scan

You cannot cut corners with your watch list. You have to go through EVERY chart from your scans. Look at their daily charts, and figure out if there is a play worth watching for the following trading day. On the names that have hot daily charts, pull up their intraday charts, and see how they’ve been behaving recently.

Did the stock close strong yesterday? Did the stock close weak? Is the stock uptrending or downtrending? Are they trading above or below the daily chart’s moving averages? Is there a recent news catalyst? Are we near-daily resistance or support? What’s the stock’s float?

Rank Your Watch List

Now that you have your watch list down to 10-20 tickers, you need to rank them. Do this at 9 am, so it is less likely you will have to change up the order due to pre-market price action. If you have limited screen real estate, ranking them will tell you which ones to put up on your screens to focus on.

Knowing what the best opportunities are will give you even more focus. You will be watching these names like a hawk for a setup, and then hammer them if it happens. But don’t force trades if nothing on your watch list gives you a setup. There are some days (like today) where nothing on my top watches list sets up, and I trade something else. It is better to be flat on the day than to force trades and be red. Just because a stock is on your watch list does NOT mean you have to trade it.

Build a Trading Plan

Make sure you define all of these things for all the stocks on your watch list:

No plan, no trade. You cannot wing it in trading. Every trade you take MUST be carefully pre-planned.
Once your money is on the line and you don’t have a plan, emotions WILL take over. Write out all of these things before you take EVERY trade, and watch how much your trade management improves.

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The post Building a Stock Watch List: Step-By-Step Guide appeared first on Bulls on Wall Street.

$300 and 200 MA big resistance levels for SPY, weak close with gap fading off. Room to fall if we continue to downtrend tomorrow.

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Here is the watch list and game plan:

$VTIQ

$ACB

$NVAX

$MRNA

$BYND

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SPY gapping down after-hours after Amazon selling off from earnings report. Watch for a fade if we cannot hold the 9 EMA.

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Here is the watch list and game plan:

$BA

$JNUG

$PENN

$RCL

$TSLA

Get Early-Bird Pricing Our Next Live Trading Boot Camp!

Learn all the trading strategies we’ve been using for 2 decades in our Live Stock Trading Bootcamp. Only the first 10 applicants will receive the discount. Early-bird pricing ends on May 7th!

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Save Your Seat for Our Next 60-Day Live Trading Bootcamp

We don’t sugar coat it. Becoming a consistently profitable stock trader is easy, or an overnight process. That’s why our 60-day Live trading boot camp is designed specifically to help struggling traders overcome their weaknesses, and expedite their path towards profitability. If you’ve capitalized on stocks from this watch list, you should definitely check out our boot camp to learn the process behind finding and taking advantage of these plays.

Our next bootcamp starts December 2nd, and spots are filling up fast. Contact us ASAP to save your seat in our next trading boot camp!

Click here to save your seat for our next live-trading bootcamp.

 

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Free Chat Day 7/29: Watch Us Day Trade Live

Next Monday, July 29th, we are doing a free chat day with our day trading chatroom. During the free chat day, you get to watch Kunal day trade live on screen share. Watch all the day trading setups and trades we take in real-time, and see all the scans, charting layouts, and other gimmicks of our trading style!

Click Here to Sign Up For Our Free Chat Day

Follow me on Twitter for real time trading setups@szaman and on StockTwits @szaman

Next Monday, July 29th, we are doing a free chat day with our day trading chatroom. During the free chat day, you get to watch Kunal day trade live on screen share. Watch all the day trading setups and trades we take in real-time, and see all the scans, charting layouts, and other gimmicks of our trading style!

Click Here to Sign Up For Our Free Chat Day

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Sign up for our day trading chatroom by clicking here.

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