How to Create a Watchlist for Intraday Trading?

Hello Traders, wonder if one can win a war without analyzing the Strength and Weakness of the opponent? Or forget the war, even if we buy anything from the market, don’t we analyze the product for its quality versus the price?

If you have stepped into the Intraday Trading profession, preparing and updating your Watchlist is the first and essential step to start with.

Preparation of your Watchlist will ensure that you have listed down all the stocks where you find an opportunity for a good trade.

Updating your Watchlist on a regular, or routine basis will ensure that you remove the stocks where you tapped the opportunity, or the assumed opportunity was missed or did not come at all.

So let’s get started with some important points to consider while preparing and maintaining a Watchlist in three parts:

Part A – Initial Criteria – Select whatever fits in

• Identify Performing Sectors

Out of all the sectors in the stock market, first, identify (at least 2 to 3) the top or bottom-performing sectors.

• Identify stocks that lead the sector

After you identify the top and bottom performing sectors, then choose the top stocks or the heavyweight stocks of that sector that are contributing the most in driving that sector in a particular direction.

• Identify for Liquid Stocks

For Intraday Trading, always make it a point to only go for High Liquidity stocks. High Liquidity stocks are High Daily Volume stocks, that give you a better opportunity to enter and exit your trades with ease.

Select stocks with high liquidity in your exchange.

Part B – Time to Narrow Down

Perhaps your list of stocks is quite lengthy by now, and may not be manageable in trading hours. Time to trim it down to the most important ones.

• Check Stocks with a good Price Movement range every day.

It is very important to check if the selected stock has a decent to good Price Movement range every day. By good price movement range, you may expect a day range of 3% to 5% or so.

Having a good daily price movement range assures you for good trade opportunities, and decent to good returns from your trade.

• Check stocks that move with the Primary Index

Best performing sector, then leading stocks in that sector, that too with sound liquidity and good price movement. All this selection may be of no or less use unless the selected stock is in line with the direction of the Primary Index. So shortlist your watchlist further to select only those stocks that are moving in the direction of the primary index.

• Look out for your favorites

Well, this step is one of my favorites. Why? Because here I shortlist my watchlist even further to the stocks in which I am confident to trade, or maybe, I UNDERSTAND THESE STOCK’S PRICE MOVEMENT BETTER.

Check which stocks make you feel more confident in your watchlist, and narrow down your watchlist even further accordingly.

• Identify Event-Driven Stocks

OOOOOOh doesn’t miss these opportunities dear reader. There are some specific events every year or every quarter that can give you high returns with the least stop-loss requirements (High Risk to Reward). Do keep a track of such events. Examples are specific good or bad news about or for a company, Company’s Quarterly Results, Court Verdicts, Monetary Policy announcement, Union or State Budget announcement, Government Fiscal Policy announcement.

• Shortlist based on your technical criteria

Lastly, you may consider trimming your watchlist based on some technical criteria, like price forming a pattern, 52 weeks high/low, day’s top gainers/losers, daily volume spurt, etc.

I will talk about this section in detail later, where I will share more articles with you on Intraday Trading Strategies pretty soon.

Part C – Keep your Watchlist updated

• Updating the Watchlist

Dear trader, as discussed earlier, a Watchlist is your basic, and most essential step while stepping into Intraday trading. And since your watchlist is an outcome of your analysis of the overall market, it is your biggest strength in this business.

Keeping your biggest strength up to the mark is your job to do without fail. Review your daily trades, and your watchlist on daily basis, and keep it updated always.

Conclusion – Yeppy, my Watchlist is Ready!!!

Hurrah and this is it guys, you are all set to fly. Do try these steps practically, and let me know if this helped you, or you need any further clarification on any step. I will be more than happy to help.

Do keep tuned in guys for my upcoming articles on Risk Management and Position Sizing, Most reliable Intraday Strategies, and a lot more.

May the GODS OF TRADE be with you… 🙂

Ciao…