Introduction
Hello Everyone,
I’m Howard Reisman, the CEO of Stock Rover. In this video we are going to give you a brief overview of Stock Rover. Stock Rover is a powerful, feature rich investment platform. This video will help you get started using Stock Rover productively.
Layout of Stock Rover
Let’s start with the layout of Stock Rover. The basic components are the header, the start menu on the left side and the main screen. The main screen varies depending on what you are doing.
Now let’s turn to the start menu. All of the power and functionality of Stock Rover begins with the start menu. You can see the logical grouping of functionality, beginning with Today’s Markets.
Today’s Market
The Today’s Market group has two items.
The Dashboard
First up is the Dashboard, When we click on the dashboard we get the following display.
The Dashboard is a great place to go to get a quick snapshot on how your portfolios and the market are doing. When I fire up Stock Rover, the Dashboard is where I start.
The Dashboard consists of a set of sections you can scroll through, beginning with portfolio performance, followed by a heat map, market movers, 52 week highs and lows, portfolio performance charted, the holdings detail table, future dividend income and the earnings calendar.
Markets
Markets is the second item in the Start Menu. The Markets Summary panel gives you a quick market summary. You can also delve more deeply into News, Stocks, ETFs, Bonds or Commodities.
My Collections
The second grouping in the Start Menu, My Collections, is really the heart of the product, and includes all of your portfolios, watchlists, screeners and everything else in Stock Rover’s world. Let’s see how it all works, using Portfolios for our example.
Portfolios
When you click Portfolios, you get a navigation tree with your portfolios organized into folders. This is where you select the portfolios you want you view.
It is also where you select whether to view the portfolios in a Table, Chart, the Insight Panel, or all three together. Let’s switch back to the Table.
You can select a single portfolio by clicking on it. Or you can select the Portfolio folder and click on the portfolios you want to see together in the checkboxes.
When at the folder level, you can control whether to view things at the portfolio level, or the ticker level by using the associated buttons in the Table header.
When you view at the holdings level, you get two additional columns that show how many portfolios a given ticker is in and in which portfolios. If you hover with the mouse you get additional information.
When you have an individual Portfolio selected, the checkboxes and the control buttons disappear.
Views
Let’s discuss the key concept of Views in the Table. Views are the set of columns you see when you look at the table. The view, and its corresponding set of columns can be easily changed with one click.
Stock Rover ships with over 700 metrics covering financial, operational, technical, dividend and price performance information. Out of the box, Stock Rover organizes things for you by providing a comprehensive set of views. Views are organized into categories, represented by folders.
Here you see all of the view folders and within them, the individual views. You can also see all of the views without the folder structure, as well as your most recent views.
An individual view is a set of metrics displayed together. Here we going to show the Growth view. Each metric is a column in the view.
And like most everything in Stock Rover, you can change the views any way you like.
To change to a different view, simply select it. I will change from the Growth View to the Fair Value View in the Ratings Folder.
Table Operations
Once you are in the table, there is a lot of power. You can select the portfolios you want, and view them by portfolio, or by the holdings within the selected portfolio.
To see and select all the column options, simply hover over the column, and click on the down arrow.
You can sort, color, group by or filter on a column. You can also view historical data.
You can also sort on a column, simply by clicking on it. I will sort my holdings by the Forward Price to Earnings ratio. Clicking again sorts the column in the opposite direction.
Note that the columns can be reordered by drag and drop. They can also be resized by dragging a column edge. Or you can resize all to fit in the display via the table resize icon in the header.
Tile Views
One final feature I want to show you in the table is the Tile View, which is a separate kind of view. Rather than columns, tickers are displayed in tile form, where each tile contains a lot of information and optionally a chart. One picture is worth a thousand words, so let me select the Valuation Tile view to show you.
The header is where you can control the tile view further. For example changing between chart, table or both. And like views, with Tiles, you can design your own tiles showing the data you want to see.
Any view that ends in the word Tile is a tile view.
The Chart
If you want to chart tickers, click on the Chart icon in the navigation. Here you can chart any ticker. Charting in Stock Rover is quite comprehensive. We have separate blogs and videos that delve into the charting facility. But I’ll quickly show you a few things you can do here.
First I will switch from Portfolios to World, which shows everything Stock Rover has in the Navigation Tree. I’ll pick the Dow 30 from the Indices folder, and select Microsoft as the stock to chart.
Note the chart date range is set by the controls at the bottom of the chart. I’ll set it to 5 years.
Charting has a lot of options in the header. I’ll show you a few fun things. First the Technicals. Stock Rover comes with a lot of Technicals. Let’s use Microsoft and display the Simple Moving Average and the MACD Technicals, two of my favorites.
Let’s also do a couple of Valuation charts for fun. First the Price vs Fundamental Chart which shows how the price of a stock tracks an underlying fundamental, in this case Earnings per Share. We can see price may be a little ahead of earnings for Microsoft right now.
The second valuation chart worth a look is the Football Field chart. This gives the current value of a number of metrics vs. the historical norms.
The best way to learn the chart tool is to explore it, by clicking on the various chart options in the header.
The Insight Panel
The Insight Panel gives you a deep dive into a lot of data for a ticker. We will use Visa as our example company. So first we select the Insight Panel, and then we select Visa. Here you can see comprehensive data for Visa. The Insight Panel is great tool for doing deep research on stocks and ETFs.
Within the Insight Panel there are a number of options – Summary, Visuals News, Analysts and Statements.
Visuals has a number of sub options – Earnings Per Share, Dividends, Monthly Returns, History, Technicals, a stock vs. its Peers and vs. its Industry. You can even design your own visual tab.
All
If you want to see the Table, Chart and Insight Panel together, then click the All icon. In this display, panels can be resized by dragging. They can be minimized and maximized. And you can pop a panel into its own separate display.
Actions
Ok, we have covered a lot already. But we have been confined to just showing data. What happens if you want to change something, for example modify your Portfolio. You do that by clicking on Portfolio in the Start menu. Then you select the desired portfolio in the Navigation panel, and select Modify this Portfolio from Portfolio Actions Menu below.
Note that all of the portfolio actions are also available by right clicking on the portfolio.
Here you can see your current portfolio in one of three displays. Allocations, Positions and Transactions.
For each of these displays, you can also control the as of date to view the portfolio holdings on the given date.
You can modify the portfolio, by changing its positions in the Position display, or by adding, editing or deleting trades in the Transactions display.
As you can see, there are a lot of other actions for Portfolios. The best way to see what Stock Rover can do is to click on the action and see what happens.
Watchlists
We have done all the heavy lifting with Portfolios, showing the essentials of how to navigate, view data and get things done in Stock Rover. The next three sections, Watchlists, Screeners and the World all work the same way, which will make the rest of this video go much faster.
Watchlists are tickers, stocks, ETFs and/or funds, you are interested in, but don’t own. Each watchlist has a name and a set tickers. Like Portfolios, watchlists can also be organized into folders.
To see the contents of a watchlist in the table, just click on it. Same for Charting, the Insight Panel and the All layout.
To modify the contents of a Watchlist, select the Modify action.
Screeners
Screeners are next. Each screener, will filter from a defined universe of tickers and present you with a subset that passes all of the screening criteria.
You can build your own screeners, from the very simple to the very complex, including your own equations, and incorporating both current and historical data. Building a screener is a huge topic in its own right and Stock Rover has lots of help and blog resources showing you how to do this.
Running a Screener
Stock Rover comes out of the box with a bunch of our most popular screeners that you can just run. And running a screener is dead easy. You just click on it.
Let’s run the Buffetology Inspired screener in the Fundamentals Summary view in the table. Here, you can see the results of the screen. We can switch and run the Safe Performers screener just by clicking on it. This is a ranked screener, which is an option to assign weights to the individual screening criteria so we can come up with an overall ranking for the passing ticker. We can then sort the display to find our top ranked tickers.
Creating a Screener
If we go to the create screener action, we can see a few key things about screeners.
Screeners can screen Stocks, Preferreds or ETFs. They can select the universe to consider. You can create a ranked or unranked screener. You can also further filter by exchange, for example if you were only interested in Canadian stocks.
I won’t go through all of this, because there is a lot. But the Stock Rover help pages will be your friend if you journey into creating screeners.
Modifying a Screener
Modifying a screener is easy in Stock Rover. I will quickly show you what the Modify Screener display looks like.
The bottom section gives you a preview of passing stocks, and also allows you to test specific tickers. However note the Preview is not complete in that it shows the first 100 tickers that pass. If there are more than 100 that pass, switch to the Table to see them all.
The World
Last, but not least, let’s take a look at the World item in the My Collections group. Here everything is combined under one navigation tree, including all your portfolios, watchlists and screeners, as well as your quote list, and the indices, sectors, ETFs and commodities.
The World navigation tree makes it effortless to switch between all the different items in Stock Rover. For example, you can load the tickers of selected indices such as the Dow 30, or the entire S&P 500. You can explore the tickers in a given Sector and Industry, or in different ETF categories.
Quotes
Let’s now return to quotes. The header is where you can enter quotes. Here, with the Dow 30 showing in the table, I will enter a quote for Applied Materials (AMAT). Notice how it is added to the data set, but is also bolded. The bolding is used to indicate Applied Materials is not a natural member of the Dow 30.
This is an incredibly powerful feature of Stock Rover, as it allows the entry of ad-hoc tickers which can be used in comparison to a given data set, such as an index, a portfolio or the stocks passing a screener you have just run.
Here we are showing the Dow 30 with Applied Materials and Google added, viewing all 32 tickers in the Historical Valuation view. We will sort the table by the 5 year Price to Cash flow range, simply by clicking on the column header.
To manage the Quotes list, just go to the dropdown arrow next to quotes. To see a table of just your quotes, go to World and select Quotes.
To remove quotes from the data set, you can do it individually by clicking the x next to the ticker. Or do it for all of them, click the x next to the Quotes. To get the quotes back, click the plus sign.
Odds and Ends
There are a several additional odds and ends that I would like to cover.
Dragging and Dropping
The first is drag and drop. You can use dragging and dropping to control which folder and in what order stuff appears in. I will drag around the Health Portfolio to show you how it works.
Drag and drop works in many places, including column order for tables.
Multi-Select
You can use Multi-select to select more than one row in a table. I often do this when creating equal weight virtual portfolios. For example, using the Dow 30 as a source, let’s create a portfolio known as Dogs of the Dow, which are the 5 highest dividend yielding stocks in the Dow. To do this, we go to World. We already have the Dow selected in the Table layout using the Dividend Growth and Yield view.
Now let’s sort by dividend yield by clicking on the column header. Now I click on the top row to select it, hold down the Shift and click on the 5th row. Now all five rows are selected. Note for non-contiguous rows, use the Control key rather than shift on Windows and the Command key on Mac.
I now right click, select Trade in Portfolio, create a new portfolio, name it Dogs of the Dow and assign each position 100,000 virtual dollars.
Here we see the portfolio performance in the Portfolio Performance view.
Search
The Search function in the Start menu is very useful and powerful.
For example if we put in the word Portfolio, we will see a variety of matches. Search will show you the actions you can take in Stock Rover regarding portfolios, as well as your creations that have the word portfolio in them. You also can see Views that have columns associated with the word portfolio, as well as metrics in Stock Rover that are associated with portfolios, and tickers that have the word portfolio in them.
Clicking on an item in the search list takes you there in Stock Rover. For example Display Correlations runs the Correlation tool in Stock Rover for your portfolios.
Help
Finally, let’s mention help. Integrated into Stock Rover is a comprehensive help system. To get help, select the dropdown menu next to your username and click on help. The help pages will open in another browser tab. Here the left side has a menu of everything you need to know about the product. Help also fully supports search.
Conclusion
We have not covered everything Stock Rover can do in this video, but hopefully we have covered enough so you get the general idea of how to navigate and get things done in Stock Rover. Exploring and trying stuff is the best way to learn many of the great things Stock Rover can do to help you becomes a better, more informed investor. Thank you for listening.
