I am trading futures and options on equities and am interested in developing a process to track and manage the trading opportunities. I am finding opportunities to trade but want to find a way to effectively manage the trade ideas at the point of execution. My trading process is the as follows: 1. Portfolio Management 2. Trade Idea Management 3. Trade Management (Execution, Trade Management, Exit) 4. Trade Review This post is about step 2, Trade Idea Management or possibly just List Management Currently I create the following lists: 1. The primary list of stocks (dollar volume greater than $900 mm scanned real time through [trade ideas pro] Secondary list of stocks (600-900mm in Dollar Volume) 2. A Watch List (Filtered from Step 1) 3. Trade List (Filtered from Step 2) 4. Trade List Peers (relative Step 3) 5. Trade List Industries (relative Step 3) The Trade List includes the Names that I will trade. I try to keep this list to less than 10 names and active positions traded to 5. I use Trade Station, Ninja, and in migration to IB. This process incorporates Wykoff, and Livermore Top Down Trading Methods into Trade Idea generation. Not really into using technical indicators, more interested in price action, so some kind of price alert structure may be helpful. Constructive feedback is appreciated. Trade execution is not my concern, managing the opportunities is. ie.
So you get many signals and you want to manage them, i.e. which ones to take? If not, your post is quite abstract in terms of what type of management you are looking for. The scanning you use is equivalent to some selection process that given a large pool of stocks will most of the time generate many signals, most of which are random because they are drawn from a large distribution with zero mean, unless you can prove your scanning invalidates this null hypothesis but I don't know how to do it personally, maybe you do or someone else. I used software like TC2000 for several years to create lists and sub-lists with many filters and although the software was good and user-friendly the longer-term results averaged to zero meaning that the signals were indistinguishable from noise. But during bull markets like in 2013 one can get the impression that it is the method that works rather than luck.
thank you for the response. however, i am looking for a process to manage trading ideas not determine stat significance. my trade management process gets the results. assume the final 10 trading ideas will be viable. as i think about this, it may be more of a project management tracking problem. perhaps more of an information management issue. my focus may need to be on how to best retrieve and manage the information. i am thinking i could create a spreadsheet to set and track price alerts on the opportunities and journal the results. during the review process I could analyze expectations to actual results to measure the quality of decision making.