Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Schwab Coaching. I' m Connie Hill. I' m so glad you' ve joined me here today for our Getting Started with Stock Investing, where we' re going to focus on what to buy. Now, when you' re new in the market, you need a lot of help, okay? So you' re absolutely in the right place to have some help. I remember when I was new, I really didn' t know what kind of a stock to look for, right? Well, it' s kind of like it' s brand new, you don' t know. Well, today we' re going to discuss that in a little bit of depth, some of the characteristics you might want to look for in a stock, and then we ll show you a scan, how to find some of those stocks.
And then we, of course, will experiment, do some example trades with them today. Now, I am joined in the chat by Lee Bohl. I' m so happy Lee' s here. He' s a great veteran of the markets. As you have questions, go ahead, chat those in. I might have to catch some of them. Lee might have to help me with some of them, but we do want you to get your questions answered because this is the place to do it. Now, if you' re listening to this on a recording, I know lots of you do, when you have a question, put it in the comment section. And then as coaches, we go back throughout the day and go see what your questions are so that you can get them answered pretty quickly here as well.
Well, we' ve got some tried and true individuals in our chat. I' m happy that you' re joining me here today. Let' s go through our disclosures and then we' ll get down to business. Before we do our disclosures, I do wanna point out, I' m on X and I do a lot of posting throughout the trading day, observations of stocks, things like that. Things that I' ve noticed that I think you might find interesting as well, I' ll post about. Lee does a lot of great posting, follow him as well. He is at LeeBohlCS and I' m at ConnieHillCS. All right, let' s jump into our disclosures. What we talked about today should be considered informational and educational. Don' t consider it a recommendation of any sort.
We' ll talk about technical analysis in our webcast, but there are other approaches, including fundamental analysis that may assert different views. This class, we have a tendency to come, combine the two of those together. We will be putting on a paper money trade at a stop limit or a stop order. It triggers a market order. Just keep in mind, it' s never guaranteeing you a particular price. Past performance of any security or strategy does not guarantee future results or success. We will be using the Paper Money downloaded software application here today, it' s a little different than the web and the mobile versions, it' s the most robust version. We know, there' s a learning curve, so try to point out some of those things to you as we go along here.
Remember, investing involves risk, including the risk of loss of principal. Now I have an announcement for you that we' re starting to make. We' ve got our next live events mapped out and ready to go and ready for you to register for if you' re interested. Okay, I' ve met Wiley at one of these events, I' m not sure who else in our class. I may have met at one of those events, but they' re fabulous. Okay. People love them. All right. They're free. You'd get to show up and enjoy yourself and eat good food. All right. And take notes about the discussion. So we' ll be in Scottsdale, Arizona, the end of the month, 26th, 27th. Then we'll be going to Chicago, May 17th and 18th.
Then in Seattle, at the end of the month of June, the 28th, 29th. Register when you feel pretty comfortable that you want to go because they do fill up pretty quickly. So I just want to give you that word of warning. All right. Now, this is a, oops, that' s an overview of our series. And we go through just a little section by little section as we start building your knowledge, right? And the things that you learn in this class, you are going to learn or use rather throughout your whole trading career and everything that you do. Okay. I appreciate Barb helped us last week, giving you the introduction. And I think it' s always good to get a take from somebody else and kind of get their perspective on things.
I thought that was a great job she did for us. We are going to be talking about kind of a little bit more still in this first block here as we talk about growth stocks and what we might want to be focusing on. All right. So as far as our agenda goes, we' re going to talk about some different fundamental metrics that we might consider using to try to find stocks that we want to be focusing on. We might want to add them to our watch list. We' re going to discuss how they can be used as stock filters. I' ll show you a scan in which we will do that. All right. First, fundamental ratio that we' re going to talk about is, I' m going to say it' s probably one of the most popular ones.
If you listen to us, we' ll talk about P/E ratios, which is an abbreviation for price-to- earnings ratio. Now, I like this little graphic here. It may kind of look like the piggy bank of sorts, but in any case, think of it kind of as an earning machine. And how much money do you want to put into the earnings machine to get out $1 of return on? Would you prefer to put in $10 to get a dollar out? Would you prefer to put in $90 to get a dollar of earnings out? Well, as you think through the math, you' re thinking, yeah, Connie, I' d rather do the $10, not the $90. Okay. I don' t want you to think that' s the only thing you should focus on.
Okay. But it is something that people might use as they try to differentiate between growth stocks, income stocks, as well as value stocks. That can play a component in there. And so it says here, you know, a ratio of 32 would mean the investor is paying $32 for each $1 of earnings to come out of the company. Now, sometimes people will really latch on to maybe just like one fundamental and many times it' s this one. But don' t be too hyper-focused on it. Okay. If you start comparing PE ratios between different peers and like companies, sometimes that can be helpful and you' ll see a wide range of that. And you' ll kind of develop your own preference. We' ll talk about this a little bit more when we get into our scan.
Now, return on equity would be nice if the companies that we' re interested in were actually returning some equity, meaning they were having returns, rather growth and producing earnings as opposed to hopefully one day starting to make an earning, right? Sometimes, maybe some days still gets into the equation, all right? But by and large, we' re looking for companies that are offering a return. So a return of 20% would indicate that a company' s generated 20 cents of profit for every $1 a shareholder puts in. We' re going to use a very flexible range here when we go into our scan because growth companies that we' re going to focus on here today, have a very wide range. And sometimes they can be really high, they can be really low.
We' ll talk about that. But looking for a return on investment is always going to be really helpful. Now, something else, volume. We want stocks that are being traded. We don' t want to try hunting in the haystack for some tiny little stock that trades 5,000 shares on the day. No, we want things we can easily get in and out of. So some people, some people might put a lower threshold. It might be 250,000. It could be a little bit lower than that. It might be a little bit higher than that. But just kind of keep your eye on it - the more volume you see, the better it is. Okay, why is that? Well, one is it' s easier to get in and out of, right?
If all these shares are exchanging hands, yeah, you can, it' s easier to get in. And then it creates what' s called a tighter bid-ask spread. And somebody actually asked me a question about this, this last week in the comment section and said, you know, why is that a big deal? What' s the, what is it? Well, we have a price that the market is saying, we will sell it to you for, and we will buy it from you for. Okay, we have this bid price, which is your sell price, the ask price, which is your buying price. If there' s a big difference between the two, let' s say there was an ask price of $75 and a bid price of $75.
So let Say the bid price of $75 was $73. So say that spread was $2. Well, your stock has to move $2 just to cover that spread that we used, that we, that it had to get into the trade. But say it' s only 3 cents. Well, the stock doesn' t have to move all that far to cover that spread, right? Before the bid price starts, starts to go above, if the stock goes the right way, it goes above the ask price that you paid for it, okay? So we are going to take a look at some examples. Let me check the chat, see if there are some questions. Wiley, I appreciate your input here saying the, you can' t believe these are free.
I know, me either, but it' s a fabulous, it As a fabulous benefit for all of you. Helen says, there' s nothing in New England yet. Helen, we typically do go out on the East coast. We have some big ones. We were at New York city, I think in August, maybe July last year. In any case, we do go out on the East coast. We do go there. However, if you live somewhere where maybe we might not go very frequently, you just may have to plan a little trip to somewhere fun that maybe you think might be a little bit nicer weather than where you are. All right, let' s transition here. I want to take us over, and I' m going to take you over to the SchwebLibes website after you' ve logged in.
Now, this is our little demo account, so we don' t have any trades in here. We just have a little bit of information, but I want to show you how to navigate to find the online course, as well as the sample investing plan. I mean, Tony did not make up all this stuff, okay? It came from somewhere. And I love hearing the testimonials of those of you who' ve been through the courses, how much you say that really helped your learning curve, because I believe it does too. All right, trying to get rid of that little frog. All right, let' s go to learn. And then this third column over right at the top, Courses. So we' re going to bring up that menu, and then we Re going to scroll down to the third course down, stock trading with technical analysis.
It' s a four hour course. And I will tell you from experience, when I was a new trader, this is so much better than all those pieces of information that I got a little over here and a little over there. This just like wraps it together in a nice tight package. Okay? And so week by week, we are going to be talking about the things that you learn in this online course. Now I' m going to take you down to the bottom today. And the reason I' m doing so is I want to show you the sample investing plan. It' s right here at the bottom. You see resources, and then it says stock trading with technical analysis, bull flag sample investing plan. It is definitely a mouthful.
And week by week, we' re going to go into it. We' re going to show you what it means. So I just clicked on it. I' m going to make it a little bit bigger so we can see it. And I' m going to jump down to the second or the third page here for this bull flag sample investing plan. Now in our classes, what are we going to be looking for? Are we going to look for something that we can buy and stick our head in the sand and ignore forever? No, we' re not. Okay. We' re going to be a little bit more active than that, but it doesn' t necessarily mean that we' re being overly aggressive.
Now my little toolbar has a mind of its own this afternoon, unfortunately, but hopefully it' ll cooperate enough so it' s not obnoxious or too obnoxious. All right. We are going to be looking for short-term rallies in an intermediate term uptrend. What' s intermediate term? It might be something like a pattern that you see of some higher highs and higher lows. You know, maybe two of each. We can use something like a 30, 40 or 50 day simple moving average that basically just averages the price over that period of time. Those would be considered an intermediate timeframe. Then the watch list criteria. What to buy, which is what we' re focusing on here today. We are going to look for stocks that have upward momentum. Okay.
So that basically is an uptrend where we' re looking for higher highs and higher lows, right? Where the stock runs up at peaks, pulls back a little bit, runs up again, peaks, pulls back a little. And so we see these series of higher highs and higher lows. As opposed to something that' s run up to the top and has maybe been pulling back for a long time. This might classify maybe a value stock. Okay. That something is trading at a bargain. In the scenario we' re looking for, we Re looking for stocks to be moving and growing. Barb gave us some good examples in her class a couple of weeks ago. Now here it says we' re going to look for daily volume of at least 500,000.
Like you mentioned, it could be 250, it could be 500,000. Those of you that maybe want to use the same stocks in your stock trading that you use in your auction trading might increase that. Okay. We probably don' t have a boatload of auction traders in here because this is a beginning class, but I know there' s a few of you that do. You might want a million or 2 million when you' re trying to create scans for yourself. And then we' Okay, looking for stocks that trade no less than $10 a share. Okay. We' re looking to have a minimum threshold there when stocks are priced really low. Many times there' s a good reason for that. All right.
So we are going to be looking for those that are increasing, that just haven' t been demolished or wiped out already. Okay. That' s what we' re going to go look for. Now I' m going to jump over here to our thinkorswim. But before I do, I want to encourage you to do something if you haven' t done it yet. And that is subscribe to our Trader Talks channel on YouTube. Why is that? Well, it makes your life easier. This is one thing. It makes it easier for you to find our content and maybe even do some binge watching over the weekend if you want or at night. So I am in here. I went to my general YouTube and I put up here in the top, Trader Talks by Schwab.
After you hit that button in the bottom right-hand corner of your screen, it looks like YouTube in a kind of a bluish color. All right. You click on that. That will subscribe you to our channel. And if you' re like me, there' s some different channels I like to watch on YouTube, some different shows, sometimes podcasts. And you can go in and subscribe to them, and it just makes it easy for you to find what you' re looking for. So at the top here, there' s our little icon, our Trader Talks. You' ll see a couple of pictures of our good-looking coaches. This is Lee joining us today. Hi, Lee. Look at his smile.
And then we' ll group them to things of maybe things that are coming up like this, upcoming live streams, as well as things that have been recorded in the past. And I' m going to take you down about just three-quarters of the way where we' re talking about getting started with stock investing. This one is for those of you who are new. When we finished up our series last time, we kind of blocked it out. So you could come over here one, two, three, four, and so forth, and just kind of go down in order. If you' ve missed some of our sessions in the past, or say you want to go and look at this one again later, this is a great way to find that.
Now, I' m going to come over here, look at the chart, the chat rather, and see if there' s something that I need to answer here. Shaneth says, if there is not enough liquidity, will the options not fill? The answer to that is they very well may fill. You put the word options in there. We' re really not talking about options here today, but if there are shares to exchange, yeah, they could get filled, but then you might have a hard time getting out, right? Say you' re buying 500 shares and only trades 5,000 shares a day. Well, you' re what? 10% of the market there. No bueno. I don' t want to do that. We want to be a teeny fish in the big sea of shares that are being traded here.
All right. Let' s see here. Dragon Rider wonders if his live chat is working. I haven' t done anything to you, dragon. I don' t see anything that you' ve done that would make somebody lock you out. But I do know that you' ve mentioned to me, you' ve had a little bit of an issue with it. Shining says, ' Hey, are these videos also classified as beginner or advanced? They are. And I' ll tell you how you can tell.' This is the key verbiage. Getting started with means beginner. Okay. This one, it doesn' t say beginning with here, but down in the labels down here, and I' m not sure why they took that away, but it' s saying, start here. If you' re a beginning stock trader, start here.
And a couple of other getting started classes. One would be think or swim. For those of you that are trying to learn the platform as well, and getting started with technical analysis. So yes, we, and actually here' s the getting started with technical analysis right here. All right. Hopefully that helps you out. It was, I don' t know if you re going to be able to see this, so you' re going to be able to see it as you' re trying to navigate and find things. We don' t expect you to be experts at everything at the beginning. Heavens. No, that would not be all that realistic. All right. Over to thinkers. When we go, we are going to talk about building a scan to find stocks. Maybe I' ll just have to kill this. Maybe no more pointing today.
I' m just going to try to get rid of it. But we won' t go back and color in anything again today. All right. I am on the Scan tab here at the top, and then I am on Stock Hacker, the tool that we' re going to lose use here today. Now, if you took any notes on the kind of stocks we' re looking for, because like I said, when I was new, I had no idea. I had to use other people to find out ideas. Okay. And it wasn' t anything organized. Like what we have here. What we have here is wonderful. When I actually, my sister ran across it and that' s how I found out about it. In any case, let' s go through.
Let' s put something together here that I think you can create on your own and be able to use. Okay. So here we have stock, stock, stock, and the three filters chosen, the three variables chosen out of the stock filter, these three, and they just always sit there at the beginning. You don' t have to use them. We are going to change it a little bit. Okay. Because there is something we want from the stock filter. We' re going to come down here. We want the price of the stock and there' s a different few different ways it' s expressed. It could be the high price today, the low price, or just kind of means the current market rate. I typically like to use last, whatever the last price was.
We want it to be at least $10. It' s 999. Where it' ll, it won' t catch it. Okay. 10 is our absolute minimum. Then there' s some other things we want to put on this little query that I' m going to teach you. And so we Re going to get rid of these two filters here, and we' re going to build some others. Okay. To get rid of it, you click on this little X. And that' s why I wish my drawing tools were being a little bit more cooperative. Maybe I' ll try it one more time. I try it one more time. Maybe it' ll be good. Hey, look at that. It was actually sort of good for me. See those Xs. We' re going to click on them.
And that just basically means get rid of this line. So that' s what we' re going to do. Adios, adios. Then we' re going to add filters here. And I' m going to reference some of the information we looked at in the sample investing plan, as well as the slides. Okay. So first thing up, we re going to look for the P/E ratio. We' re going to look for a couple of fundamental filters. So I' m going to select on that twice. This very first one, like I said, it' s going to be that P/E ratio. And, it is, I believe it' s spelled out here. And it' s all, you go down, it' s alphabetical, right? Here is our price earnings ratio. It gives you some different ones you can choose from.
Do you want a five-year average? Do you want current? I typically just use the current P/E ratio. And then we' re going to put a range in here. The range might be a little broad for those of you that have maybe been value investors looking for really low PE ratios, or maybe some of you that are looking for income stocks. We are going to fill in a range here of seven to 80. Now you could go higher if you want. All right. But there' s plenty in this realm. And, and growth stocks sometimes have really high PE ratios because they' re trading on the future growth of the company. All right. Stocks that typically are in a lower range of more mature stocks.
They' ve been around the block many times and they' re not in growth mode anymore. All right. So that' s our PE ratio. Then we' re going to look for the, you know, there' s an element that the company is generating some earnings. Okay. We' re going to look for a return on equity, ROE. Going to bring this up here. We' re going to put in a minimum. Now, one of our references, I think on the slide said, you know, they just used an example of 20%. And that is a pretty healthy rate of return. I don' t know if we have any business owners in here, but can you imagine if your particular company were returning, 20% equity, just religiously, man, you' d be like doing the happy dance, right?
We are going to use a value in here of 15. Alright, still there in a business only might be doing the happy dance with 15 as well. Now, the next piece that we' re going to add are going to come from a filter called Study. And the warning I' m going to give you is that the Study filter doesn' t work in paper money. So, what you have to do is just log into your live site of Paper Money, build the scan, get your results, share your watch list with yourself and just bring it on over. Okay. I only have one instance of Thinkorswim up right now, but it' s really is not hard to do. If you' re on a Windows machine, you can have your paper site open and your live site open at the very same time.
Mac machines, not so much. Okay. But Windows machines, easy to do. All right. So, the first Study we Going to grab here has to do with the volume of the stock. If you remember initially when we had a stock filter here, one of it was one of the filters that came in. One of the variables was volume, but it' s only on today' s volume up to this point. So you go try to run this first thing in the morning. You' re like, nothing comes up, right? Because stocks haven' t been open for very long. So we' re going to do an average here. So we' re going to click here. We' re going to come down here to volume, and then we' re going to choose average volume.
And then it throws out some basic parameters, but we' re going to change them. Right? So it' So, going to say average volume over the last 50 periods or periods or trading days. Okay. We' re going to change this to 30. Okay. So not as much time. So only about six weeks trading. And then with the average volume being, greater than the default, it puts in here as a million. Now, remember on our investing plan, what did it say? It said 500,000. And again, if you' re using this for options, yeah, you might want to raise that threshold. Okay. The next couple of things we' re going to put in are going to help us figure out the trend, identify the trend of the stock.
Remember, we' re looking for stocks that are making progress, right? That they Re making higher highs and higher lows. So we' re going to look for stocks that are up in the last three months and stocks that are also up in the last month. Okay. We want it to do both. So let' s go find them. So we' re going to choose a study here. We' re going to choose price performance, and then we' re going to come down here and we' re going to go for price change. Okay. So price performance, price change. I forgot to tell you, take as many notes as you want. Okay. Just do take as many notes as you want. Things that will help you remember. All right.
So now we' re going to do it twice because once for the intermediate one is for the short-term trends. So two price changes. Now on this first one, we' re going to look for the price of the stock to be the closing price. I should say is going to be at least 15% greater than, and then we' re going to tell it how long, how long ago we' re going to put in here 65 bars, which is about a quarter' s worth of information. So the stock has to be up about at least 15%. Okay. We' re going to find some that are even more than that in the last quarter. And because the market has been so bullish. And so typically you' ll, you' ll see a lot of candidates here.
And then for this one, we' re going to make it be the shorter term trend. And we' I' m going to look for stocks to be up at least 5%. In the last 20 bars. So basically, 20 trading days, that' s about a month' s worth of time. Actually, this actually I' ll do it 21 bars. Technically, that' s what I usually use on a one- month, 21 bars. All right. That is the scan. Now, if you come over, if you you' re building it with me and you want to save it, come up here to the little stack manual by the sizzle index, that flame. Hit save scan query. Give it a good name. Like maybe PE seven to 80. Are we minimum 15? Whatever the volume is things that'll help.
You know, I call mine growth stocks because this is really my scan to help me identify growth stocks. So do something you' ll remember. Okay. I' m not going to save it again. So I don' t. So I can keep my stuff clean. All right. And there' s a couple of different things we can do. I' m going to hit scan here. And oh, this said 50. I' m going to change it to 200. I want to see this is saying 77. There we go. That' s a lot. That' s a lot to go through. Now. I had it sort by. It says sort by symbol. I actually changed it to volume here. So the ones that with the highest volume over the last 30 days.
Well, yeah, the last average, this is actually today' s volume. You can see some of these have a lot of volume. You I' m going to recognize some of these names. Amazon. Exxon mobile. Meta. And you, I can' t remember what it is. Shockwave. Oxy. I mean, these are kind of some big names. I' ve heard of those stocks. All right. We can do one of two things. One, we could put it on a watch list here, select on the menu. Okay. Let' s say save as watch list. And I' ll go ahead and do one here. Growth. And then I like to put the day' s date. So it' s a four, five. Two, four. All right. Then I know when it' s old, it' s a more than a month old.
I usually need now. Okay. Connie go update it. So that' s one way we can save it. Another way is if you go ahead and you save it. As a scan query in the stock hacker. Then when you go to pull up the watch list. You can come over here. And you can come down to personal. And mine is called, Let me down here. Growth stocks class. Meaning this is a scan. I show you in this class. Okay. For growth stocks. If I, if I saved it, this' ll come up and it' ll be dynamic. You don' t have to go around the scan. You can just pull it up here in the left-hand side. Now I can also go find that watch list. I created. I, if I say personal.
Let' s go down to our growth. Okay. Here' s our five, four, 24. They' re identical at this point. Okay. Simply because we saved it. And it' s the end of the day and things haven' There changed. All right. If I sort well, I just sorted alphabetically, but you' ll see some of the same stocks. There' s our Amazon and so forth. All right. Once we have some stocks, we' re going to watch them. Just because they came back in our search doesn' t mean that they have buy signals. We will get into specific buy signals. Okay. The time is not yet. We' re going to get into technical analysis next week. And then we will start talking about, you know, things that we might look for to decide if it' s time to buy.
Let me check here real quickly. Art. You said yours only came up with 12. Okay. Art. I' m going to say, look at one thing. Mick, look up here and make sure that your other filters up here that I didn' t even touch. Say scanning all stocks, make sure there' s no intersecting with or exclusion. Cause we could, if we wanted to, we could say, ' Hey, go intersect with the S and P 500.' If we wanted to, we could do that and it would shrink our list down. And that might be a way that some people decide to. Maybe get a little bit of a more manageable list for them. Okay. So make sure those are all though that way. The, the other thing is. On the price.
Make sure you' ve got both of these set to greater than. Okay. Well, we' re looking for downward trends. We' ll change this to go west then. So let' s just make sure that' s anybody else run it and, and had. The results come out. Okay. For you. If you did go ahead, chat in, let me know. And then we' ll see if art' s been able to get his to clear up. Okay. Looks like we' re current with the questions. All right. Let' s look at these. Okay. I' m going to go to the charts. Where I didn' t have a basic chart set up here. All it is, is 30 day moving average. The red line.
I' ve got it set to the SPX right now, but when we just look at some of the stocks, we' ll start seeing that volume. Now, how do you connect them together? Okay. This is just slick functionality. Kevin learned it yet. Now today' s a good day to learn. Okay. We are looking at, I' m going to just draw a box around it. We' re looking at this little box to the right of the ticker symbol where it has one in a red box. And our watch list here. What have we got? We' ve got a one in a red box. Okay. It doesn' t have to be the one in the red box. You actually have nine choices. All right. I just have it because it' s on top, but if you want.
Seven orange. Just make them both seven orange. And as you get more experienced with the thinkers, one platform and what you might do with it, you might find a use to use some different colors for different purposes. But for right now, as you' re beginning to use the platform, just one or two will probably be sufficient for you. Okay. So pick your favorite, whatever that happens to be. Then we can click on this icon here. Or not the icon, but the ticker symbol. And with my hat, I' m going to take my hand off the mouse. I' m going to go to my keyboard. I' m just going to hit my down arrow. And I' m just going to go down through these stocks.
Now, as I just, I' m just going through them kind of quickly here. All right. They' ve all got uptrends. They' ve all got an intermediate uptrend. This 30- day moving average is headed up. And then the short- term trend over the last month, it' s up as well. So we, so we can use that. Little scan, little stock caper. Okay. That little query we saved, we can use it over and over and over again. And as the results change, then it' ll update. Now you probably don' t need to run it every day. If you want to, you could, right? But for by and large, a lot of the selections that it came back with, a majority of them are going to stay.
And then as data changes, friends change, return on equity changes, what, what is the growth index? It' s okay. Yeah. Then that list is going to vary a little bit. And that' s why I said, ' if I put a date on it, I know how old it is.' But usually I just choose it off of my, my, uh, growth stocks Box list. Okay. So yeah, all of these, you' re like, ' Ooh, I may be.' Hopefully you' re like, ' I like the look of that' because you' re recognizing, uh, the uptrend and that there' s a lot to really choose from. Okay. So I' m going to go back to, Let' s see, a couple questions here. Okay, Art, sounds like you found out what your issue was.
Perfect. And then Blackie, how did I set up the watch list scan? I' ll go back to it. Okay, take a couple notes. I' m going to go back to scan. All right. This was our criteria. So I' m not going to set up the whole criteria again. Just make some notes. All right. And then when you have time, you can go build it. Remember, here on this study, you' ve got to do that on your live side because paper does not support this study function right here. Okay. But you can go create it, run it on your paper account, build a scan, let it come up. You can save the watch list or you can even share the watch list and you can share it with yourself. Okay.
And then you just bring it up in your other, bring it up on your paper version. Okay. Now, let' s see. Let' s take some time to look at a couple that I was able to spy out earlier. Now, just because we run the scan don't t mean that, you know, we go through here and think that they' re all ready to buy because they' re really not. Okay. Sometimes you might find some that might have an entry signal that you' re looking for, but not always, you know, sometimes we find them. And I was hoping I found one here. You know, sometimes we find when the app' s definitely in an uptrend, but the last five days, this stock' s been down. Right. Dick' s sporting good.
So might not be the right time to buy it. Oh, look at this one. How lovely it' s been running up eight days in a row. Okay. You might say, well, okay. Some of those other stocks have been doing good. Maybe wait for a little bit of a pullback and we' ll, we' ll talk about that next week. All right. Let' s look at, first of all, we' re going to go down since I alphabetize these, we' re going to go down a little bit. I' m going to go to the V' s and we' re going to pick this little stock VNOM. VyprEnergy, has it been in an uptrend that really has, this is a six month chart we wanted.
We could go back further in time and see everywhere that it' s been, but we' re going to just focus on kind of what we can see in front of us right here. This 30- day moving average is heading up. If you're, you ll start to notice a stock that gets a 30- day moving average going up because it has higher high points and higher low points. Right, they just get a little bit higher on the top side, a little bit higher on the bottom side, which is awesome. And what we like to look for now, some of you are going to be aware of this because I know that, you know, as I know some of you, uh, that one thing we can look out to see if it has an entry signal at the time we' re looking at it.
One of those is a breakout. Okay. We' re going to talk about support and resistance next week. What that really is. But just kind of in a nutshell, okay. Resistance is a place where the stock runs to, kind of has a hard time getting over. Okay. So like saying this, 38 area stocks run up to it, pull back down to here about 35 and then rallied again. And what it took like six days to finally get over it today. So today we would call it a breakout, which some traders might use for an entry signal. Now, every class, I do want to show you the process of placing a paper money trade, want you to get used to the mechanics and how you do this. So this is going to be our example.
Now I' m going to skip some steps on you because I want to introduce them to you in detail, but I' ve done some calculating and I have determined with this particular stock, we can buy 227 shares. And we Re going to put what' s called a stop loss on it. And a stop loss just means we decide in advance. If the stock goes to a certain place, then it' s probably not doing what we thought it was going to do. And so we might decide to get out. So we put that stop in place when we realize, eh, yeah, if it gets that low, it' s not doing us any good. So the price I' ve chosen here, and we' ll get into the details of it next week and why we went there, but it' s essentially about $34.
94. Oh, my mouse is so close to it right now. Uh, what I want you to notice is it' s well below this line. That should start acting as support. A place that keeps the stock from falling down, uh, but sometimes see how it' s kind of bouncing off this moving average. So I' ve, I' ve kind of placed it a bit below that. Okay. So that it has a little bit of wiggle room. So let' s go put the trade in again. If I have a one red in this box over here on the trade tab, then the stock ticker symbol comes over for us. We' re not dealing with options. We' re going to just kind of follow. I' ve collapsed at the last price today was 39. 24.
Sometimes the bid and the ask prices get a little ski wampus. So just kind of check and make sure it' s not like a big dollar amount more, right? If it' s 39 bucks, make sure it' s not 51. Okay. Uh, you can always change this price. I' m going to do a right mouse click. We' re going to say by custom, and then I' m just going to choose ' stop'. Okay. Then it' s going to allow us to put this all together. I' m going to collapse this side. So you can see. All of the order entry here, I told you, and I' ll show you, you know, one of our sessions, how you actually get this number I determined in advance. We could do 227 shares.
The green line is our buy order. This pink line is our exit order that we' re going to configure. If the stop at the stock gets below that price area that we' re not comfortable with, uh, 3908, I' ll leave the price there. Maybe it' ll go there Monday. If not, I can go in and adjust it. And then the stock price that I told you was $3,594. That' s the leeway we' re going to give it. Now, when I said buy stock with stop, it' s just configured this for me, just the way that I need it. I have to update the quantity. I have to update the price. It put it in as a stop order, which means if it gets to this price or lower, it' ll trigger a market order and a market order just says, fill me at the next available price.
Okay. I just need to get out. That' s what that market order means or get in. You could put it on an in order as well. And then we re going to make this order here. Good till canceled. Okay. Um, that means that stop loss will stay there for about six months. Hopefully by then we actually will have moved it and adjusted it. We' re going to hit confirm and send. We' ll just review the order here. Make sure we didn' t typo something wrong. Right. And then this is just a reminder that. The loss will trigger that market order. So it' s just reminding us of that. We' re going to go ahead and send it in, but I' m going to put it in my bucket called, uh, uh, getting started with stock investing.
I have our own little bucket where I send our trades to, because we may use them in future sessions when we start discussing some of these additional principles. All right, let me check the chat real quick. See if there' s something I need to, uh, let you know, or answer. I' ve already sent it in, but I' m going to go ahead and add it in the chat. Oh, Shanta says I can draw the line, but I cannot put the value. Okay. Those of you that are learning think or swim, you may want to just take advantage of the getting started with ThinkOrSwim classes, but I' ll show you real quick. Okay. Because yes, mine is adjusted. Draw your line. Do a right mouse click. Oops. Beyond the line a little better than I was.
Okay. Beyond the line. Right. Mouse click. Right. And then you' re going to say, edit. properties and this is where you can tell it what do I want you to look like okay so I said show the price on the left, you could do it on the right or to have it not show at all, the default is do not show, so yours is probably that I changed my color to blue and I made it thicker, I made it a width of three instead of one which is the default and this color here, the default. So, I livened it up a little bit okay if you get it set the way you want it click on save as default and then all your lines that you create will look the same okay so great question all right uh Jolly Holly says is it okay to start with a hundred a hundred dollars
you know what I would say is I would practice in your paper money and do as many trades as you see whether it' s appropriate for your account size or not because that' s how you build your skills right you' re not going to build your skills if you' re kind of stuck and can' t do much because you' re saying oh it' s only a hundred dollars, practice just use that whole hundred thousand dollar portfolio and paper do those example trades where you' Relearning without restricting yourself, and then you can work with somebody to see what the appropriate size is to start your account. Okay, I don' t have really that kind of information all right. So we got started down the path a little bit here, talking about some of the fundamentals we might might want to look for growth stocks.
We showed you a scan that you can develop yourself and do so that you too can be using the results of that. And then really I' m going to encourage it to just even though you feel like you maybe don' t even know how, go ahead in your paper account and do some some example traits if you want to do it with quantity of one, do with quantity of one, okay, it doesn' To make any difference to me, you just want to get good at the mechanics and where do you click on so you can send in your order and then once it' s in, how do you go find it? What should you look for after that? Those are going to be some of the things we' ll be getting into in future weeks.
All right, very good. Looks like we covered all the questions here. You guys been great today, Lee, thank you for your help in answering questions and being here today. Okay, next week we' re going to move to the next step which is looking at technical analysis. If you want to get ahead, you can go to the course and you can go into those sections about technical analysis because we Are going to talk about them next week, all right, you guys have a great weekend; we' ll see you bright and early Monday morning, 9: 30 at the opening bell.
