Getting Started with investment.tips

How do I place trades?

Every Stock Actions recommendation carries two price levels: a Buy Stop, the price at which you want to enter, and a Sell Stop, the price at which you want out if the position moves against you. Both are stop orders — you stage them at your own brokerage in advance and they sit dormant until the market trades through your price, which is what lets you do this outside market hours. The evening before, you place a Buy Stop with the time-in-force set to Good Til Cancelled; if the stock trades up through your stop the next day it fills on its own, and if it never reaches that price nothing happens. The ticket is much the same at every brokerage: enter the symbol, choose the Buy Stop order type (some platforms label it “Stop Market”), set the stop price from the recommendation, enter your share quantity, set time-in-force to GTC, and confirm. The Sell Stop is the mirror image, placed on shares you already hold.

The full walkthrough — with the exact screens for Fidelity, Schwab, Robinhood and others — is in How to Execute Stock Actions at Any Brokerage.

Many brokerages also offer a conditional order type — Schwab calls it One-Triggers-All, Fidelity calls it One-Triggers-OCO — that submits the Buy Stop and its matching Sell Stop as a single after-hours ticket. The Sell Stop stays inactive until the Buy Stop fills, then goes live on its own, so both sides of the position are staged in one sitting rather than two. That order type is covered step by step in Place Tomorrow’s Trades Tonight: The One-Triggers-All Order Type.

What if I place the trade after the market opens?

As always, this is a judgment call and the decision is yours. The mechanics do not stop at 9:30, though — stop orders can still be placed after the market opens, and a stop placed mid-session behaves exactly the same way. Two situations are worth knowing.

If the market is open and the stock has already risen to the Buy Stop price we specified — or above it — a Buy Stop no longer does anything useful, because the condition it was waiting on has already occurred. In that case you would simply place a Buy order at market price instead.

Conversely, if you own the stock and it has dropped to or below the Sell Stop price, you can place a market Sell order rather than waiting on a stop that has already been passed. Whether to act at all — at the open, later in the day, or not that day — remains your decision.

What if I don’t want to place all these trades?

You do not have to place all of them. Buy Actions are listed top to bottom in the strategy’s own ranking order, so the list arrives already prioritised: start at the top and take as many as you want. Picking the top three or so is a reasonable way to begin, and starting with a single position is fine too.

How far down the list you go depends on your comfort level, your investment goals, and how much you are putting to work — a small amount spread across many positions leaves you with awkward share counts and more orders to manage than the added diversification is worth.

One caveat on the ordering: ranking is how the strategy sorts the day’s candidates. It is not a forecast, and it does not mean a higher-ranked position will outperform a lower-ranked one.

How many shares do I buy?

We do not say. Every Stock Actions recommendation gives you a stock and two price levels — the Buy Stop and the Sell Stop — and stops there. The share quantity is the one field on the ticket that the recommendation deliberately leaves to you.

That is because it depends on things we cannot see: how large your account is, what you already hold, your goals and your time horizon, and how much movement in a single position you are prepared to sit through. Two subscribers can act on the same recommendation on the same morning and each correctly buy a very different number of shares. What we publish is identical for everyone on a track — it is not personalized investment advice, and it is not built around your circumstances.

If you want a second opinion before sizing a position, that is a good conversation to have with a financial professional you retain directly — someone who can see your whole picture. We are not that person, and we do not stand in for one.

The only sizing note we will make is the practical one from the question above: spreading a small amount across many positions leaves you with awkward share counts and more orders to manage than the extra diversification is worth. Past that, it is your money, and the number on the ticket is your call.

There’s a Sell Stop listed for a stock I don’t own.

Then no action is needed. A Sell Stop applies only to shares you actually hold, so if you do not own the stock there is nothing for you to do and nothing to place.

What it means is that a Buy Stop was published for that stock at some earlier point, and you did not end up holding it. That happens for several ordinary reasons:

• you were not subscribed yet when that Buy Stop was published;
• you saw it and chose not to act on it, which is always your call; or
• you placed the Buy Stop and it never filled, because the stock never traded up through your stop price.

In any of those cases you never entered the position, so the Sell Stop that follows it does not apply to you. The list is published per strategy rather than per subscriber — it shows the strategy’s own open positions, which is why it can include stocks a given subscriber never bought.

One thing not to do: do not place the Sell Stop anyway to make your account match the list. A sell order on shares you do not hold is a short position — a different trade with a different risk profile, and not something we are recommending here. Skip the row, and act on the ones that apply to holdings you actually have.