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Here’s a MarketSmith tip on how to quickly set an alert at the shaded areas indicating profit or loss. The primary benefit of the approach I’ll show below is that MarketSmith will do the math to determine the price for the relevant gain or loss.

As a reminder: The blue shaded area is 0 to 5% above the pivot price. The profit target, green shaded area, is 20%+ above the pivot. The red shaded area is 5%+ below the pivot.

Begin by moving your mouse over a shaded and right-click. A small pop-up will appear with the text Set Alert. Tap on the pop-up and a dialog with the alert price will be shown. Tape Done to set the alert.

Here are two quick workarounds if you find the top right of a MarketSmith chart is not viewable.

Option #1 - Zoom In

This is the option that I prefer as once the zoom level is changed, all the charts (in theory) should show within the constraints of the display area.

On the downside, the zoom is applied to all the content on the display. For instance, the font size will also be larger so there may be fewer lines of EPS and Sales information shown in the lower left of the Fundamentals area when viewing a weekly chart.

Rather than re-invent the wheel and always build screens from the ground up, with MarketSmith, you can search and find screens that other users have created and shared.

In the short video that follows, I’ll walk through how to find several screens created by Chris Gessel, IBD’s Chief Content Officer. I’ll also show a quick tip on how to track a screen, such that you’ll have quick access to those same screens in the future.

A goldmine of information can be found by looking at the stock holdings of top growth funds. This short tutorial will show you how to find this information in MarketSmith.

I’ve included a short list of several highly regarded growth funds that you can review for their holdings. I’ll also cover a few additional ways to locate fund holdings if you are not a MarketSmith subscriber.

One way to reduce volatility in your portfolio is to focus on stocks that have an average daily dollar volume of at least $20 million.

In this post I’ll show you how to calculate the average daily dollar volume and how to sort lists in MarketSmith based on the 50-day average daily dollar volume.

There is nothing magical about $20 million. What’s important to take away is that stocks with a lower average daily dollar volumes may have more volatility and are typically thinly traded.

How you choose to determine what is a good baseline, depends on your investing style and risk tolerance.

A channel can be a helpful guide to visualize support and resistance. MarketSmith includes a comprehensive set of markup tools, with one of the options being a set of parallel lines (a.k.a. channel).

In the short video that follows, I’ll show you where to locate the markup tools as well as how to configure a channel on the Nasdaq composite.

It’s worthing noting, when you use a markup tool, anything you draw on screen will be saved. For example, if you markup a chart with a channel, when leave to view a different symbol, upon return, the channel will be restored. Pretty cool, huh?

I previously wrote an article about the RS Line: RS Line vs RS Rating – What’s the Difference? I explained the basics of the RS Line and the information it represents. What I didn’t cover are examples showing how to best put the RS Line to use - that’s where this post comes in.

As a quick review, the RS Line plots the performance of a stock versus the S&P 500. For example, if the S&P 500 is declining, and at the same time a stock is rising, that stock’s RS Line would trend up.

If you run multiple screens in MarketSmith on a regular basis, you may find it helpful to combine the output into one list. An added benefit is that merging lists will also eliminate duplicates, saving you time.

The short video that follows shows how to merge the output from two of my custom screens.