[isatrader]

I was wondering if you could address the topic of portfolio management a bit?  How many trades do you have active at a time?  Do you set your trade size by the risk percentage in your portfolio, allocating a set percentage to each trade, or some other method?  I'm wrapping my brain around this type of trading, doing the course on Udemy (have only the trader entry and the 3 minute conclusion video to go), and am considering how I'm going to transition to this type of investing.  I'd love to hear your thoughts!

For me personally it varies between my investor portfolio and my trader portfolio's. I like to be fairly focused, much more along the lines that they talk about in the CAN SLIM method of around 4 to 10 stocks at a time. But, I have been up to around 15 stocks in my short term trader portfolio recently, as I don't like to get more focused into less stocks until they start moving through additional Stage 2 continuation buy points and the market conditions are favourable.

I use my own method for risk management based on the individual stocks volatility, by using the 52 week Average True Range to adjust my position size, so that all my stocks risk the same amount (roughly 2% of the account) to their stop loss position. This means that more volatile stocks have much smaller position sizes than larger less volatile stocks.

Thanks for taking the course on Udemy. I hope you've enjoyed it. It's only a short primer on the methods stages and entry points, but I try to stress the importance of focusing on the method requirements for getting into the best stocks. As a lot of beginners to the method try to do the opposite, and pick stocks that have had massive Stage 4 declines, and virtually no Stage 1 base and loads of resistance, instead of the stocks with the strongest relative strength, volume and very little or no near term resistance.