Watchlists are your own lists of symbols, saved separately from your scans. They replace the old Universes feature, and they do a lot more than the old lists did.

The big idea hasn't changed: you can use a watchlist in several scans. Once you update your watchlist, all scans will be updated as well.

What's new is that a watchlist is now a place you can actually work in: you can see live prices, IV Rank, Stock Score and dozens of other data points for every ticker on the list, build lists that update themselves, and pull ready-made lists off the shelf.

You'll find everything under Watchlists in the top menu.

The page at a glance

The left sidebar holds your lists, grouped in three sections:

• My Watchlists: the lists you build yourself.
• Smart Watchlists: rule-based lists that we keep updated for you.
• Predefined: indexes and ETF holdings.

Click any list, and it opens on the right as a table. Above the table you get the list's name, how many symbols are in it, when it was created and last edited, and the buttons you need to work with it.

There's also a search box at the top of the page if you'd rather find a list by name than scroll for it.

Creating a watchlist

1. Click + New Watchlist at the top right.
2. Give it a name and click Create watchlist.
3. Type your tickers into the Add symbols box (a comma or a space separates multiple tickers) and click Add.

That's it. To remove a symbol, click the “X” at the end of its row.

Four ways to fill a list

Typing tickers is only the first one.

1. Type them in

Use the Add symbols box. You can paste a whole batch at once: AAPL, MSFT, NVDA or AAPL MSFT NVDA both work.

2. Import a CSV

Click Import at the top of the page and drop in a CSV file. 

All we need is a Symbol column with one ticker per row, any other columns are ignored, so a broker or spreadsheet export works as-is. If you'd rather start from a clean file, click Download template, fill it in, and drop it back. Imported tickers are added to the watchlist that's currently open.

3. Add from a scan

Click Add from scan, pick one of your saved scans, and every underlying ticker popping up in its results is added to the open watchlist. 

This is a one-time snapshot: the list doesn't stay in sync with the scan afterwards, which is exactly what you want when you're building a list of candidates you found today and plan to follow from here on.

4. Copy a ticker from another list

Every row in every list (including the Smart and Predefined ones) has a + button at the end. Click it and pick which of your lists to copy that ticker onto. 

It's the quickest way to skim a ready-made list and pull the two or three names you actually care about into your own.

Smart Watchlists: lists that update themselves

A Smart Watchlist is a list defined by a rule instead of by a fixed set of tickers. We run the rule for you and refresh the members, open one and you'll see updates automatically next to the symbol count, plus a line telling you exactly which rule is behind it and how long ago it was refreshed.

There are 17 of them:

• Analyst upgrades - Analyst Rec. change (1m) > 0
• Cheap options (low IV) - IV Rank ≤ 20
• Earnings this week - Earnings Date ≤ 5 sessions
• Elevated put skew - Put Skew Rank ≥ 80
• Ex-dividend soon - Dividend Date ≤ 5 days
• Far below analyst target - Distance from Target Price ≥ +50%
• Heavily shorted - Short Ratio ≥ 10
• High dividend yield - Dividend Yield ≥ 4%
• High growth - Stock Score Growth ≥ 8
• High IV Rank - IV Rank ≥ 80
• IV richer than realized - IV − RV Percentile ≥ 80
• Near 52-week highs - 52-week high distance ≥ −2%
• Near 52-week lows - 52-week low distance ≤ +2%
• Top gainers - Stock Change ≥ +5%
• Top losers - Stock Change ≤ −5%
• Top Stock Score - Stock Score Fundamental ≥ 8
• Unusual volume - Stock Volume Power ≥ 3

Because the membership is driven by the rule, you can't rename a Smart Watchlist, delete it, or add and remove symbols by hand. You can Duplicate it, though - which gives you a copy you own and can edit freely.

Predefined watchlists

These are the standard universes, ready to go: S&P 500, NASDAQ-100, Dow Jones Industrial Average, Main market ETFs, the full set of SPDR Select Sector funds (XLK Technology, XLF Financial, XLE Energy, XLV Health Care, XLI Industrial, XLP Consumer Staples, XLY Consumer Discretionary, XLU Utilities, XLRE Real Estate, XLC Communication Services and the rest), and a handful of thematic ETFs such as ARKW, BUG (cybersecurity) and HERO (video games & esports). 26 lists in total, each one holding the fund's current holdings.

Use them when you want to define your investable universe without maintaining it yourself - “only S&P 500 names” or “only what's inside XLE” is one click away.

Browsing and pinning lists

Your sidebar only shows the lists you've chosen to keep close. To see everything, click the grid icon next to any section heading - that opens Browse Watchlists, with tabs for your own lists, all 17 Smart Watchlists and all 26 Predefined ones, each showing its symbol count and (for Smart lists) its rule.

Click the star next to a Smart or Predefined list to pin it to your sidebar, and click it again to unpin. That way the three or four ready-made lists you actually use stay one click away and the rest stay out of your way.

Making the table show what you care about

A watchlist isn't just names on a page - it's a live table. Click Customize columns and you can pick from around 90 data points, the same ones you filter on in a scan, organised into four groups:

• Descriptive Data (7) - company, sector, industry, type, exchange, market cap, 10-day trend
• Technical Data (24) - price, change, volume, ATR, distance from 52-week high/low, moving averages, beta, performance over 1M / 1Q / 6M / 1Y / YTD and more
• Consolidated Options Data (19) - IV, IV Rank, RV, IV−RV, call and put IV Rank, skew and skew rank, volatility score, options volume, open interest, put/call volume, weekly options
• Fundamental Data (41) - Stock Score, P/E, PEG, P/S, P/B, EPS and sales growth, margins, ROE, dividend yield and payout, short ratio, insider and institutional transactions, analyst recommendations and target price, earnings and ex-dividend dates, DCF value and more

A search box at the top helps you find a column by name. The Shown tab lists the columns you've picked and lets you drag them into the order you want (Ticker is always first). Note that your column choice applies to all of your watchlists, not just the one you're looking at.

If you work with more than one set of columns - say a volatility view and a fundamentals view - use the preset dropdown next to the button and click Save as preset. You can then switch between views in one click.

You can also drag the edge of any column header to resize it, and click any ticker to jump straight to its research page.

Exporting

Click Export to download the open list as a CSV, with all the columns you currently have showing. Handy for a broker upload, a spreadsheet model, or just a backup.

Renaming, duplicating and deleting

The “...” button next to the preset dropdown holds Rename, Duplicate and Delete watchlist. Duplicate is useful when you want to branch a list - keep the original and experiment on the copy - or when you want an editable version of a Smart or Predefined list.

Using a watchlist in a scan

This is where watchlists earn their keep. There are two directions you can go.

From the watchlist: Use in a scan

Open a list and click Use in a scan. Pick one of your saved scans and it runs restricted to that list - your watchlist becomes the scan's symbol universe. It's the fastest way to ask “what does my covered-call scan find among the 12 names I'm actually watching?”

From the scan: Include/Exclude Symbols

Inside any scan you'll find the Include/Exclude Symbols filter under Descriptive Data. 

This is the filter that used to be called just “Include Symbols”, with excluding handled by a separate filter. Both now live in one place, and it's a lot more flexible than it was:

• + SCAN - what the scan is allowed to look at. Click Add list to pick a watchlist, and type loose tickers into the box next to it.
• − EXCEPT - what to leave out. Same two options: lists and loose tickers.

The important change: you can add more than one watchlist. In the old version you could attach a single list and that was that. Now you can mix several watchlists and individual tickers in each row, on both the include and the exclude side.

That opens up combinations that weren't possible before, for example:

• Scan S&P 500 + NASDAQ-100 but exclude My Positions, so you never get suggestions on names you already hold.
• Scan My Core Names + High IV Rank to catch your usual suspects plus anything with unusually rich premium.
• Scan XLE + XLU and exclude Earnings this week, to stay away from event risk.
• Scan your whole universe but exclude two or three tickers you simply don't want to trade - just type them into the EXCEPT box.

And, as before, the link stays live: change what's in the watchlist and every scan that uses it changes with it - no need to open each scan and edit it.

A few ways to use this

• A watchlist, in the old-fashioned sense. Keep a list of names you're interested in right now, with IV Rank and Stock Score as columns, and glance at it in the morning. Add and remove names as your interest changes and your scans follow along.
• Your open positions. Keep a list of what you hold. Use it as the universe for a roll or exit scan - and as the EXCEPT set in your entry scans.
• Themes. A list per theme - SaaS, uranium, whatever you follow - so you can scan a theme in one click instead of retyping tickers.
• A shortlist from a scan. Run a broad scan, then Add from scan to freeze the results into a list you can follow over the next few weeks.
• Off-the-shelf universes. Star S&P 500 or a sector ETF and use it to keep your scans inside a well-defined universe without maintaining a list yourself.
• Idea generation. Star a couple of Smart Watchlists - High IV Rank, Unusual volume, Earnings this week - and treat them as a daily starting point.