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The significance of monitoring your trades

If you have placed a trade and are now monitoring it, your trading journey has officially begun. Putting in the effort to maintain a position after placing a trade is a distinguishing characteristic of a successful trader.

As a trader, it’s important for you to review your portfolios’ performance to adjust and improve your overall strategy. Your method should always be one that aligns with market changes during the holding period.

There are two questions you should ask yourself when evaluating performance:

· Does your current position perform in the same direction as your goals?

· Does it perform similarly with comparable trades during a reasonable period?

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How often do you need to review position performance?

There is no right answer, but you should have a plan when it comes to reviewing your positions. Many choose to design their monitoring plan on trade frequency.

The idea is that your movement should be aligned with your trading strategy. For instance, if you often do short-term trades, more frequent monitoring can be applied to your positions.

Regularly review your portfolio summary to help you have a clear view of your position performance, balances, and order details.

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Evaluating your gains and losses

Before setting your position, you also need to keep in mind where you want to gain and where you may lose in your strategy. While the market is varied, its movement can vary from your expectations at any time. So, it’s crucial to understand your investment model for each trade.

On the Webull app, you can open a stock you hold and select the profit and loss summary to see your account’s profit. Scroll up to see the components, proportions, and contributions of gains and losses to get a general view of your total investments. Think about if it meets the goal that you set for your strategy. If the loss level is beyond your initial goal, reconsider your expectations and whether the overall strategy needs to be adjusted.

Create a summary to review your profits and losses. This can help you when it comes time to make new investments.

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Disclaimer: All companies or symbols provided are for educational and informational purposes only and does not constitute an investment recommendation or advice.

Here’s an example

You cannot assure every single trade makes a profit. But if you look at the bigger picture, do your overall profits outweigh losses? If so, then your trade strategy may be efficient.

For example, say you invest $1000 on every trade, making a strict exit plan to take your profits at $100 and stop your losses at $50. If only 4 out of 10 of your placements were right, assuming you reach the full profit of $100, you would gain $400 and lose $300 (loss of $50 per trade x 6 trades) which means your profit is $100 in total.

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Stay informed about your investments

On the Webull app, there are many informational and analytical tools to utilize to find investment ideas and opportunities. For example, you can open a stock page, check news, find analyst ratings and technical analysis, or view a firm’s fundamentals, such as key indicators. Using that information can help you form opinions on a particular firm.

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Fully leveraged information will help you make an informed decision when placing a trade and is essential to helping you monitor your positions. For instance, news of interest rate increases could affect the price movement as well as impact your position. Knowing when and if interest rates are going up can keep you in the know about how your trades might perform in the near future.

It’s necessary to understand your position and perform further analysis to improve and validate your strategy.

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How do alerts help your investment?

As a trader, maybe you can’t focus on your investments and keep an eye on the markets throughout the day. Even so, you don’t want to miss good timing for entering or exiting a trade. Setting an alert can help you do this without needing to constantly watch the market. An alert can notify you in time about macroeconomic news, industry index, firm movement, analyst rating changes, and numerous factors that may affect your investments and trading actions.

On Webull, you can set several kinds of alerts. For example, with price change, set a price where you want to be notified. You can also choose to receive an alert if volume exceeds an unusually high point. This may signal that a stock is increasing its momentum. Additionally, Sharp Rise/Fall, 52 Week High/Low, news of a particular firm, or press release could influence the stock price.

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How can you set an alert on Webull?

Click here to see a tutorial video.

• Enter the stock's details page.
• Tap on the alert button at the bottom of the page.
• Fill in your parameters and save.
• Tap Menu-Shortcuts-My Alerts to manage all your working alerts.

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The bottom line

Not all processes are about figures or numbers. There’s a lot that goes into keeping track of your trades. Eventually, you’ll need to decide if your chosen strategy is working for you. If not, it’s important to know how to make adjustments. Using different technical and fundamental indicators as you monitor your investments can help you decide how you should go about your next steps.

Being open-minded about your mistakes can help you become better at decision making and allow you to become a better investor.