Creating and using effective watchlists
A good watchlist turns an endless market into familiar ground: learn how to create your lists, organize them by strategy and plug them into your scans, autoscans and backtests.
Tens of thousands of assets are listed around the world: nobody can follow them all, and nobody needs to. Experienced traders almost always work on a small universe they know well, and the tool that embodies that universe is the watchlist (called "Lists" in the app). This guide shows how to create your lists, organize them intelligently and use them as the entry point for everything else: manual scans, autoscans and backtests.
Why watchlists: a known universe instead of the whole market
Chasing the entire market is the surest way to master nothing. Every asset has a personality: its volatility, its liquidity, its trading hours, how it reacts to news. By limiting yourself to a few dozen instruments you follow regularly, you develop an intuition for their normal behavior, and therefore the ability to spot when something unusual is happening. That is exactly what screener signals cannot give you on their own: context.
A watchlist also has a psychological benefit: it reduces the fear of missing out. When your universe is defined in advance, you no longer wonder whether today's opportunity is hiding in a market you are not watching. It is in your lists, or it does not exist for you: and that is a very good thing.
Creating a list: every market in one place
Creating a list takes seconds: give it a meaningful name, then add symbols through the search box. Type a ticker (BTC, AAPL, SPY…) or a company name, and pick the asset from the results. One important point: a single list can freely mix different asset classes. Nothing stops you from gathering in one list:
- Cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Ethereum…) alongside US or European stocks.
- ETFs to track entire sectors or regions with a single symbol.
- Indices (S&P 500, Nasdaq 100…) to keep an eye on the market's underlying trend.
- Currency pairs if forex is part of your playground.
This freedom is valuable for beginners: you can build a "general" list reflecting everything that interests you, then split it into specialized lists as your practice takes shape.
Organizing your lists: by strategy, sector or style
A single catch-all list always ends up unreadable. As soon as you pass twenty or so symbols, structure your lists around a logic that matches how you trade. Three approaches work well, and nothing stops you from combining them:
- By strategy: a "trend following" list for assets in clean trends, a "mean reversion" list for instruments oscillating in a range. Each list becomes the natural universe for the matching screener.
- By sector or market: technology, energy, crypto, European indices… Useful for comparing assets that react to the same catalysts.
- By style and horizon: a "long term" list you review on weekends, a "swing" list you scan every evening. Separating horizons prevents short-term decisions on positions meant to last.
Name your lists after their purpose, not their content: "Daily swing" or "Breakout candidates" tell you what to do with them, whereas "US stocks" says nothing about your intent. A list whose reason for existing you can no longer remember deserves to be merged or deleted.
Using them everywhere: scans, autoscans, backtests
The real power of watchlists shows when you plug them into the other tools. Everywhere the platform asks you for an asset universe, your lists are available:
- Manual scan: run a screener on a single list so that only candidates from assets you already know come back.
- Autoscan: monitor a list continuously and get an e-mail as soon as one of its assets meets your conditions, without the noise of the full market.
- Backtest: measure a strategy's past performance on your list rather than on assets you will never trade, for results more representative of your actual practice.
This continuity creates a virtuous circle: you scan your lists, the results show you what works, you refine the lists accordingly, and your next scans become even more relevant.
How many lists per plan
Limits depend on your subscription: the free Position trading plan offers 4 lists of 50 symbols each, the Swing trading plan (€12.99/month) moves to 20 lists of 200 symbols, and the Day trading plan (€24.99/month) goes up to 100 lists with unlimited symbols. To start out, 4 lists of 50 instruments already means up to 200 assets under watch: more than enough to build a serious universe.
On the free plan, scans run only on your watchlists, never on the full market. Your lists are therefore not a mere convenience: they are literally your field of view. Take the time to build them well, because an asset missing from your lists is an asset your screeners will never see.
Start simple: a list of thirty or so assets you chose deliberately, reviewed once a month. Add what your scans surface, remove what you no longer look at, and let your lists evolve with your experience. It is a small maintenance investment for a permanent gain in clarity.
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Keep exploring
- FeatureWatchlists: your favorite symbols and your scan and backtest resultsGroup the symbols that matter to you (across every market) and reuse those lists as the universe for scans, backtests and automated scans.
- FeatureThe multi-indicator, multi-timeframe screenerCombine technical indicators, timeframes and comparison operators to keep only the assets that match your strategy exactly.
- FeatureAutomated scans: your screeners on autopilotBots watch the market for you: they re-run your screeners at every candle close and e-mail you the moment an asset matches.
- FeatureThe backtesting tool built into your screenersBacktests built from your screeners: entries, exits, fees and full metrics to judge a strategy on numbers instead of gut feeling.
- FeatureCharts built for technical analysis13 stackable indicators, a full drawing toolkit and annotations that are still there every time you come back to a symbol.
- IndicatorRSI (Relative Strength Index)The most popular momentum oscillator: it bounds the strength of a move between 0 and 100 and flags overbought and oversold conditions.
- IndicatorSimple Moving Average (SMA)The oldest and most widely used trend indicator: an average of recent closes that smooths out market noise and acts as a dynamic reference line.
- GlossaryTimeframeA timeframe is the duration each candle on a chart represents (from one minute to several months) and sets the horizon of the analysis.
- GlossaryStop lossA stop loss is an automatic loss-taking exit level, set before entering a position, which caps each trade's risk at a predetermined amount.
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- GuideRunning a manual market scanA manual scan runs your screener on demand over the universe of your choice: learn how to pick that universe, read the results, refine your rules and know when to move on to automation.
- GuideSetting up trading alerts with autoscansLet your screeners watch the market for you: create an autoscan in two clicks, get an e-mail as soon as an asset matches, and avoid noise with a few best practices.
- GuideBuilding your first screener, step by stepHow to turn a strategy idea into objective rules, pick the right asset universe, read scan results and iterate until you get a genuinely actionable list of opportunities.
- GuideThe complete beginner's guide to tradingEverything you need to understand before placing your first order: reading a chart, choosing your style, using the right indicators, managing risk, and practicing without risking a cent.