For the life of me I could not find an investment tool that was exactly what I was looking for, at least not for free. I've tried keeping track of my watchlist through Excel, keeping a simple text file open keeping track of my notes, writing my ideas in Google Keep and staying on top of them, the works. Still, I found myself spending an annoying amount of time on Finviz checking up on my watchlist and researching my stocks. Keeping up with news was annoying, and automatic alerts were expensive.
Then there was of course the issue of accountability. As my strategy develops, and as the market dips and dives, the definition of "what works" changes. Keeping track of my ideas on a per-ticker basis while simultaneously managing my whole watchlist and staying up to date on news became increasingly difficult, and remembering the specific reasons that I made a decision to buy or sell are only as good as my ability to document them. Let's be honest, we're not going to open up a clunky Excel spreadsheet just to write a few words every time we make a trade.
Bullish, in its current form, is a tool to help consolidate and streamline the process of managing your ideas and honing your strategy. Bullish is a tool that, rather than keeping an eye on the stock market, makes sure that you are performing up to your standards - whatever those may be. Its list of features will be ever-changing, so we'll discuss those in the next section.
The current build of Bullish offers the following (all through command line, to eliminate any bullshit):
- Build out your watchlist. This is the first step. Add, remove, and of course check, your watchlist at any given moment. Not super excting, but what's cool is what you can do with it... We'll get there
- Check news on demand for any ticker listed on Nasdaq, Dow, or S&P. If your ticker is on an exchange, you can grab news going back any number of days for that ticker to either peruse headlines and visit articles that interest you or dump into a report that you can print and scope out for goodies
- Check news on demand for your whole watchlist. Similar to above, but this time you can treat your whole watchlist as its own entity. No more opening tabs for each ticker, just request to grab all news for the day for every ticker in your watchlist and have everything in front of you, ready to go
- Log your notes for any ticker in your watchlist. Sure, you can do this with a notes app, but the key to any successful investing strategy is consistency. When you add a ticker to your watchlist, a special "notes" object is created. This notes object, for each ticker, has some fundamental fields like "financials", "catalysts", and "ideas" that you can populate/update. The date of each entry for each ticker is automatically logged, so that you'll always be able to check why you made a certain decision
- Turn your computer into an alerts machine. Why pay a monthly fee to get email alerts for your watchlist when you can do it for free? Build out your watclist, configure your alerts with a few keystrokes, and you'll get reports of any news sent to your email however often you need them
All you need to get started is Python. I'll expand on this later.