How to Track Institutional Stock Trades (5 Steps)

Select a stock you want to pursue and search for it in the stock quote window of almost any search engine or to any brokerage firm website. Enter the stock symbol and when the quote appears, look for and click the 'research' tab. Some sites, like Yahoo Finance, will display the research options automatically on the same page.
Click on 'ownership' or 'holdings.' Under this tab, you'll see the various entities that own the stock. There will be several choices such as 'Insiders' and a few others. One of the headings will be 'Institutions' or 'Institutional.' Here you will find a list of Institutions that own the stock. You'll see how many shares they own and what percentage they hold of the shares outstanding.
Check to see if you're in good company. What are some of the institutions and are they institutions whose judgment you trust? If what you see piques your interest, then take it a step further.
Track institutional activity in the stock. Since institutions don't typically broadcast their trades so as not to tip their hands to the competition, tracking real-time institutional trades is difficult; however, if you check back a couple of times a day, you'll see trades not long after they've taken place. If there's a change, note if it's an increase or decrease in the institution's holdings. Especially important are any instances of institutions selling all their stock, or a new institution investing in it.
Use the information wisely. If after a few weeks or months you notice institutions are increasing their holdings, you know interest is up on the stock. If the number of shares is dropping from institutions, then momentum is slowing and you should try to find out why before investing. Here's hoping you make a bundle!

How to Measure Volatility of a Stock

Create a spreadsheet to compile and calculate stock price information. Make a separate page in the spreadsheet for each stock you are going to track to keep things simple and organized until you get accustomed to keeping and reading this type of data. For each stock make a column for historical stock prices and another for daily stock prices.
Make a list of the stocks you have holdings in currently and those that you are considering investing in. Write down stock names, trading symbols and stock prices with dates. Access historical stock price data and copy the information directly in to the spreadsheet you created.
Enter all historical information in to the spreadsheet. At a minimum you will need one month worth of daily stock prices to get started but for better results six months of historical stock price data is good.
Calculate what is known as the average closing price. This is done by finding the average of the stock price based on a period of time. Taking the six-month window of historical data as an example, you would find the average price of a stock over six months by adding all of the daily prices from the six-month range and dividing that number by 183. A different example would be for a 20-day period; add all 20 daily numbers and divide by 20 for the simple average.
Take the average closing price and calculate the difference between that average and the actual closing price. If you are using a spreadsheet you would create a third column for this information. This number is what is known as the deviation.
Square the deviation number and then add together all of the deviations for the time period that you are tracking. Then you take that sum of the squared deviations and divide that number by the time period you are tracking. For example, in the 6-month example you would divide the sum of all squared deviations by 183.
Take the square root of the last number calculated and you are left with the standard deviation. A higher standard deviation number means higher stock price volatility which then implies more pricing swings and movement, which is attractive to higher risk investors.