OK…let’s be real?  How many of you went out and watched the movie Dodgeball after reading last weeks blog?  I know I did because that is just classic cinema, or as Bania said it in Seinfeld… its gold Jerry! It’s gold! LOL

If you haven’t had the time to peruse last week’s edict of the rookie blog we talked about some ways to pick stocks and more importantly we talked about how we test our favorite stocks to make sure they are suitable for trading without getting taken advantage of in the marketplace.  There was a little dodgeball analogy in the blog that I hope others found humorous as I know I did.

This week we are going to take our discussion of suitable stocks a little further.  Last week I said there were a million and one ways to pick a stock to trade.  You can pick them because they have some meaning to you or you can pick them because they have a great setup or any host of other reasons, but what if you want to pick stocks that are based on a specific trade type that you want to do or that have specific criteria that must be satisfied before you were willing to trade them?   What is a trader to do then?   At that point, traders look for other tools to help find these stocks and those tools would fall under the scanning heading.  We can scan for specific stocks that meet specific criteria and then use those stocks to trade.  Once we have that list from our scanning tools then we can make a watchlist and enter that into our broker software so that we can refer back to those stocks again and again to find trade opportunities.  So this we are going to do two things in this blog that will prepare us for making us our first trade.  First, we are going to do some scans and then we are going make a watchlist that is as it is described a list of stocks to watch for trading opportunities.

We are going to switch this blog up a little bit this week and I am going to put together a couple of short videos that you can watch to see how the above-mentioned process works.  This will bring us a little further down the line towards our goal of making our first live trade.  So enjoy the videos and let me know what you think about the blog.

Take a look at these two videos and see if you can whip up a few scans and make a few watchlists.  We will use these when we start looking for our first live trade.  Play around with the screener you might find some fun results by putting on or taking off a few different metrics.

Next week we will look at some candidates on our watchlist and determine if there are some trades in there and then we will continue gathering information for our trades.