If you followed along with the previous article, then you now have a watch portfolio at Yahoo! Finance. And, if you decided to go ahead and edit your portfolio as I suggested at the end of that article, you either experienced an epiphany as you played around with the various options or you became so frustrated that you decided to keep your money under the mattress.

All I can say to those of you who freaked out over those portfolio choices is this: You wanted to learn about the stock market and a watch portfolio represents one way to learn firsthand. So turn off the rap music, take the phone off the hook, and send the kids to your sister's house. Then spend the next hour with me and I'll help you learn a few terms of the trade.

Go back to that portfolio, open it up, and click on the "edit" link located by the bold "Performance" link at the top of that portfolio. A window will open that offers a variety of links from drop-down menus on the left, and a number of options are also listed at the right under various headings. If you look closely between the links on the left and the lists on the right, you'll realize that both lists contain the same options.

Under the "Basics" list at right you'll see the list of options that might have appeared in your watch portfolio when you first created it. You have the ticker symbol for the company you chose, the name of that company, last trade (with time), last trade (price only), and so on. I'm not going to explain most of those terms, because they're self-explanatory. Instead, I'll offer suggestions about what to add after that ticker symbol this week so that you can learn more about how a stock reacts with volume and change?

So, yes, keep the ticker symbol as your first option in the left menu, but lose the name unless you really cannot remember which companies you've chosen for this exercise. Try to build your watch portfolio to reflect these options:

1. Symbol - the ticker symbol for the company you've chosen.
   
   
2. Last trade (with time) - If you choose this option over a weekend, you'll see that the date shown will reflect the date of the last trading day. Otherwise, you'll see the last time that stock traded during a trading day. You'll also see the last price of that stock.
   
   
3. I will suggest that you add or keep "Volume" and "Average Daily Volume" options in that order, because you can learn a lot about how a stock moves by watching the volume for that stock and by comparing that volume to its average from week to week.
   
   Say that you plugged in XYZ stock and you discovered that the average volume is 226,964 (add three zeros after that number so that it equals 226,964,000). During the following week you notice that the stock price slowly slides downhill, but you also notice that the daily volume is only half the average volume. Then that company might release a "good news" press release and the volume and the price might increase. Alternately, I've seen stocks where the price increased on lower volume and decreased when the volume increased. The point is to watch this correlation between volume and stock price, because each stock behaves differently. As you watch this correlation between volume and price you can learn the best opportunities to either purchase or to sell this particular stock.
   
   
4. This change will be reflected in the "Change" option in your watch portfolio, which can be your next option. "Change" shows how much that stock has gone up or down in dollars and cents between trades.

Now you want to add the following options that were already in your basic portfolio:

If you already added a number of shares owned and the price you paid for those shares as recommended in the previous article, then you can see how the other options play out in this scenario.

Your holdings value is the sum of the shares owned times (x) the price paid plus (+) any "Change" (#4) that occurs between the time you added those shares and now. The "Day's Value Change" reflects that difference, as it shows the number of shares times (x) "Change." This change is verified in the "Holdings Gain and Percentage," only that heading should read, "Holdings Gain or LOSSES and Percentage," as you'll also see any losses that occur in your watch portfolio in this column as well as the gains.

Spend some time with the options you added today to learn how those tools interact with each other. Once you become familiar with how these options work, you'll be ready to add more gizmos to your watch portfolio. But, I'll let you relax for another week before you tackle those. By then you might be ready to invest that mattress money again.

Until Then,
Linda Goin