by Steve
Last Updated 07/02/26
This post contains affiliate and referral links. If you sign up through my links, I may earn a small commission or reward at no extra cost to you. This helps support the blog.
More stocks doesn’t mean more trades. It means better trades. Expanding my trading bot watchlist is exactly what proved it.
When I first built my trading bot it had a watchlist of a dozen or so stocks. The usual suspects — TSLA, NVDA, AAPL, AMZN, a handful of others. Stocks I knew, stocks I’d heard of, stocks I probably would have picked myself anyway.
Which was exactly the problem.
My Original Trading Bot Watchlist Was Just My Gut in Disguise
I thought I was building a systematic trading bot. But if I’m hand-picking the stocks it watches, I’m not really removing emotion from the process — I’m just automating my own biases. The bot was only as good as my stock-picking instincts, which aren’t exactly proven.
I wanted the bot to find opportunities I’d never think to look for. Stocks I’ve never heard of. Sectors I don’t follow. Companies that aren’t in the headlines but are quietly showing strong momentum signals.
To do that I needed a bigger list.
The First Expansion — S&P 500, NASDAQ 100, and Dow Jones
The first step was straightforward. Instead of a hand-picked list of favorites, I pulled in the full S&P 500, the NASDAQ 100, and the Dow Jones components. That jumped the stock watchlist from about 15 to roughly 550.
The same thinking applied to crypto. The bot had started with about 8 cryptocurrencies — again, ones I knew, ones I’d heard of. So I expanded that list too, for the exact same reason: more opportunity, less gut instinct. More coins in the scanner means the bot finds the best setups rather than whatever happens to qualify from a short list.
Every 30 minutes the bot was now scanning roughly 550 stocks and a growing crypto list, checking each one against the same signals — price above the 20-day moving average, price above the 50-day moving average, and RSI in the buy zone.
The difference was immediate. The bot started surfacing stocks I never would have looked at myself. Utilities. REITs. Mid-cap industrials. Companies doing genuinely interesting things from a momentum perspective that I’d completely ignored because they weren’t flashy.
It felt like going from fishing in a pond to fishing in a lake.
The Second Expansion — Adding the S&P 600
550 stocks still felt like I was leaving opportunities on the table. The S&P 500 and NASDAQ 100 skew large-cap. I wanted exposure to smaller, faster-moving companies that don’t make it onto the big indexes.
So I added the S&P 600 — the small-cap index most retail investors never think about. On the crypto side I expanded from a dozen coins to dozens more, same logic. By the end of this round of upgrades the bot was scanning roughly a thousand stocks and 29 cryptocurrencies every 30 minutes.
At that point the bot is covering a huge swath of the market. Large caps, mid caps, small caps, tech, finance, healthcare, energy, consumer goods — if there’s momentum somewhere in the US stock market, the bot has a decent shot at finding it.
What Actually Changed Day to Day
Here’s what surprised me most about the expansion: it didn’t lead to a flood of new trades. The signals are the same — the bar to qualify is just as high. What changed is the quality of the candidates when signals do fire.
With a dozen stocks you might get zero qualifying setups on a given day. With over a thousand you almost always have options — and the bot can pick the best ones rather than whatever happens to qualify from a short list.
It’s the difference between choosing the best candidate from three applicants versus thirty. Same hiring standards. Better pool.
The Performance Question
I’m not going to share specific performance numbers yet — that’s coming in a future post once I have enough data to say something meaningful. What I will say is that expanding the watchlist changed the character of the bot’s trading. It finds setups I never would have found manually, in stocks I never would have watched, and that’s exactly what I wanted when I started this project.
Up Next
In my next post I’m going to talk about something that might seem counterintuitive — there were stretches where my bot didn’t buy anything for days. And why that was actually a sign it was working correctly.
If you haven’t already, sign up for Robinhood with my link and we’ll both get a free stock 🎁
Steve is the founder of Bot and Bull. He personally uses every app reviewed on this site and only recommends what he genuinely believes in — no press releases, no paid placements.
Some links in this post are referral links, which means we both benefit when you sign up through them — at no extra cost to you. Bonus amounts, terms, and availability are set by each app and can change at any time. Always confirm the current offer before signing up. Terms apply.
The Bigger Trading Bot Watchlist, In Short
Growing my trading bot watchlist was never about chasing more trades — it was about giving the system a wider, fairer field to choose from. If you are building your own bot, a well-designed trading bot watchlist matters far more than raw size. For the full walkthrough, see my guide on how to set up a Robinhood trading bot from scratch.