As the saying goes, time is money. Nowhere is this true than in the financial markets. When trading in stock market assets, time is the key factor in every transaction. Making a trade too early or too late will have a disastrous effect on your gains. In this article, the FixyTrade editors look at six tools that will save you valuable time. Whether you are a beginner or an experienced trader, these tools will help you!
Tool N°1: The Watchlist
The first time-saving tool that we want to suggest is the watchlist.
What is a watchlist, you ask?
Well, it’s simply a list of financial assets that you are interested in. The idea is to set aside a small window of time at the start of the week to look for the financial assets you want to track. The choice of assets in question will obviously depend on the type of trading you practice, whether that is scalping, day trading or swing trading.
What the watchlist represents is a huge time saver. Indeed, when you define in advance the markets in which you intend to position yourself and then list the assets that suit your needs, you will not have to search for new market trends every day and waste time trying to find patterns that suit you. Obviously, the watchlist is only useful if you are able to define your needs. To do this, we recommend that you start a trading journal, which we told you about in a previous article. This will help you to list exactly what you are looking for and to optimise your watchlist.
It is possible to find watchlists directly on the internet, which are offered by various sites. However, we would generally advise against them. Indeed, trading is far from an exact science, and the choice of assets that you use must be in line with your strategies, which means it is much better to put together your own list. However, you can still use them as a starting point, as they are updated from week to week.
Tool N°2: Position size calculator
This is quite simply a calculator that allows you to better manage the risks you take. Indeed, the larger a position you take is, the riskier it may be. Position calculators will help you find the perfect size to minimize losses.
They are based on the Stop Loss principle. As a reminder, the Stop Loss is an indicator available on trading platforms that will sell an asset as soon as it reaches a certain loss-making price. What the calculators do is estimate that price, plus:
- How many assets you would need to buy in order to take a position,
- How many assets you would need to sell in order to generate gains,
- What entry and exit price you should aim for in order to make a good trade.
These calculators will save you time because they are based on mathematical formulas, so they give objective ranges to aim for and allow you to adjust your strategies directly accordingly.
Tool N°3: Price alerts
If your broker does not offer you an alert tool, stop reading our article and go change brokers.
These are truly one of the most useful tools on trading platforms because they prevent you from constantly obsessing over the charts and waiting for the prices to fluctuate. You just have to analyse an asset and set a price at which it will be beneficial to trade. All you have to do then is activate the alerts with your broker in order to be notified when the financial asset reaches the desired value.
This saves a lot of time that you can invest in analysing other assets and optimising your trading strategies. It would be foolish to miss out on this tool.
Tool N°4: FixyTrade, Your Trading Co-Pilot
Training also saves time, because its basic purpose is to learn from mistakes and become more efficient.
If you are wondering how FixyTrade can help you do this, the answer is simple.
FixyTrade is an all-in-one piece of software that allows you to synchronize your trading platforms, plus your favourite tools. It enables you to keep track of all your trades using a trading journal, so you can analyse your mistakes as you make them using no fewer than 64 indicators. It gives you access to your trading score, your losses, and your gains, all in one place.
FixyTrade is a platform that is designed to make this task easier by bringing together all the information you need in order to grow as a trader. And developing your skills translates to increasing your income.
In addition to being intuitive and easy to navigate, it promises to help you become a better trader.
Tool N°5: Scanner, an essential tool
If you are interested in stock trading, it is impossible to do so without learning how to operate a scanner.
Scanners are tools that allow you to track the changing fluctuations in the market, to follow particular markets in parallel with others. Scanners are tools that give you a global overview of what is happening on the stock market, and it is this global overview that will save you time, because it is simply impossible to assess each share and each market individually.
In addition, some scanners offer very attractive options, such as the on-demand option. If you’ve read our article on the best tools for new daytraders, you know what we’re talking about. The on-demand option provided by scanners allows you to trade, fictitiously, in the past. Why is this option so appealing? Quite simply because it allows you to learn to manage the behaviour of an asset without creating losses.
It is an exercise that allows you to create working strategies without having to put your balance at risk. In addition to creating gains, you can train yourself and become a better analyst, which will save you valuable time in the long run. For anyone interested in these, we suggest the following platforms:
- Thinkorswim, which is a completely free platform,
- Amibroker, which is a kind of premium version of Thinkorswim, which you do have to pay for, but which offers you many more options and tools for your analyses.
The advice of the editors would be to learn to use the scanners provided by Thinkorswim, so you can avoid investing money for no reason, then switching to a paid version once you are comfortable enough with the parameters to be taken into account and how it works.
Toolk N°6: Backtesting platforms
We just talked about these indirectly when we explained the on-demand option. This is actually the very definition of backtesting.
Backtesting consists of testing your current strategy on past data from a market or an asset in order to test whether the strategy is effective when implemented or not.
Backtesting is based on a simple idea in reality. It is assumed that any pattern that worked in the past may work in the future, because the intervals over which you test your strategy may recur, as the markets fluctuate in a constant manner.
The odds that a chart will never repeat the same shape are extremely low, and this is why backtesting works. It gives a certain tangibility to your strategies and therefore enables you to adapt and improve them.
There are different backtesting platforms. To name a few, we suggest:
- Amibroker,
- Tradestation,
- Multicharts.