Strategies

The heart of the autoinvestor is the autoinvestor strategy. The strategy is a highly customizable tool for describing your personal investing philosophy. Stockworm's powerful rule sets are included as a part of the strategy description, giving you a great deal of flexibility and power as to how you define your strategy. Examples include "pick stocks using my favorite stock screener" (add stocks in screener rule), "only purchase stock if 'macd 8-17-9' is in a 'buy' state" (trading signal filter rule), "sell stocks which have a loss greater than 30%" (stop loss rule), "sell a stock if it is no longer in my favorite stock screener" (sell not in screener rule). Strategies can include long positions, short positions, or a mix of both. The strategy rules can be different for short and long positions.

The Stockworm technology set is constantly being evolved and improved upon for the benefit of our customers. For these reason, two strategy types are currently available to you:

• standard strategy - the standard strategy is the latest generation autoinvestor strategy. This strategy allows for multiple open rule sets and allows you to specify how much weight each position will occupy within your portfolio. The primary conceptual difference between the standard strategy and the classic strategy is that the standard strategy does not explicitly have any close rules; rather old positions are closed and new positions opened whenever the strategy rebalances the portfolio and finds that the current holdings do not match the list of stocks generated by the open rule set(s). An additional difference is that the standard strategy does not allow for short positions (this feature will be introduced in the future).
• classic strategy - the classic strategy manages portfolio holdings based upon open and close rule set, both for long and short positions (you specify the mix of long and short positions using a strategy setting). Positions are closed only when the close rules explicitly call for positions to be closed, in contract with the rebalancing approach used with the standard strategy.

Autoinvestor strategy list

When you visit the strategies section, you will see a summary table listing all of the strategies which you have previously created, along with tabs for Stockworm and Community strategies:

You can sort each of the different strategy list based upon the available column headings. For each of your saved strategies, you can simulate, rename, delete, or share (post to the Stockworm forums) the strategy. For each Stockworm strategy, you can simulate the strategy or view the strategy and then save it as your own for further modification. The Stockworm strategies are backed by simulated portfolios which allow you to get a feel for the strategy performance using the same statistics which are described on the simulation results page. You can also click on 'details' to see the details of each simulation behind the statistics. Community strategies can be saved as your own and then modified to suit your needs.

Autoinvestor portfolio management

Once you have described your investment strategy, you can automatically manage one or more portfolios by associating each portfolio with the strategy. The autoinvestor will then compute automated buy/sell ratings on each portfolio by applying the strategy to the portfolio. The result will be either a list of positions to close along with replacement positions to open or a message letting you know that no action is necessary (your portfolio is aligned with your strategy).

You can have multiple strategies, each associated with its own portfolio. This allows your strategies to have different investment styles (you can, for example, have 'conservative' and 'aggressive' strategies associated with different portfolios).

The autoinvestor can automatically send you an email each morning with the recommendations, for your convenience.

Autoinvestor Simulations

Before applying a strategy to a real portfolio, it is always useful to apply the strategy to a simulated portfolio using historical stock data. This allows you to test and optimize the performance of the strategy.

The simulation feature allows you to apply your strategy to a simulated portfolio using historical stock data. Furthermore, all of your past simulations are stored so that you can review and compare different strategies and use this information to design more profitable investing systems.