Creating Watchlists to Track Investing Ideas

One of the underappreciated tools at investors’ disposal is the watchlist. A watchlist is simply a set of investments you are monitoring and would consider buying under the right circumstances. Those circumstances may be a drop in the market, a change in the investment’s characteristics or a period of time when you have cash available to make a purchase. The latter could be after you sold an existing holding or added new money to your account.

A great way to build and track a watchlist is My Portfolio. Though we built this internally at AAII to help members track their portfolios, it works equally as well for monitoring and maintaining watchlists. This week, I’m going to go over some of the features and explain how you can use My Portfolio to monitor your own watchlist. In doing so, I’ll discuss the features that are available to all AAII members and the advanced features that are available to A+ Investor subscribers. For those of you who are interested in accessing the A+ Investor features, we are running a Memorial Day promotion: You can try out A+ Investor for 12 months at $97.

You can create either a portfolio or watchlist by simply going to My Portfolio and clicking on “Create.” If you’ve never set up a portfolio, you’ll be prompted to do so on the My Portfolio home page. From there, you enter in the ticker symbols for the stocks, mutual funds or exchange-traded funds (ETFs) you wish to track.

Alternatively, you can create a watchlist or add to an existing one in My Portfolio via many of the tools throughout the AAII website. These tools include the stock evaluator page, the mutual fund evaluator page, the ETF evaluator page, AAII stock screens and the mutual fund and ETF guides. You can also do so through the various stock, mutual fund and ETF tables displayed on the Investing Ideas page. A+ Investor subscribers may find addtional investment candidates to add to their watchlists through the A+ Stock Grades Screener, Funds+ Screener and ETF+ Screener as well as through the mutual fund and ETF First Cut screens, which can be accessed through the Screening page. All you have to do is click on the plus sign icon next to the ticker symbol you are interested in.

When you create a watchlist in My Portfolio, you’ll get useful information for tracking those investment candidates. AAII members can monitor price performance, change in value since being added and fundamentals, as well as keep notes on each stock, mutual fund or ETF in the watchlist.

A+ Investors can do all of these things, plus see the current A+ Grades and Scores right in My Portfolio for all of their holdings. These grades and scores are updated on a daily basis. The A+ Investor grades can be particularly useful on days when there is a big market move and you want to see if anything on your watchlist is currently worth adding. They are also helpful for deciding which investment on your watchlist to consider as a potential addition to your portfolio.

Another useful A+ Investor tool is My Portfolio Insights. This will tell you which of the stocks on your watchlist are currently passing one or more AAII stock screens, and which screens they are passing.

Combining a watchlist with these tools helps you have an existing list of ideas and the information available to determine which of those ideas has become a timely investment candidate for consideration.