Thanks again for all the replies. Am I the only one that thinks the current market is difficult to make money in ? Lot's of fear, me included. I was probably violating every rule in the universe and using poor judgement, but I used the tight stops overnight which, after, as I said earlier, I lucked out because of the 20 stocks I had, about 7 went significantly positive, so it paid for the other 13 which gapped down then back up. Typical specialist action, and I looked at the charts for the openings for the last 5 days to get a feeking for what that gap was and how they acted. Past performance didn't match today's results. Had I held at the open and sold around mid day, I would have had some profits. I guess that makes me a swing trader. I'm not using this method now, and I decided to start using stops placed below the current support levels for the stocks. I guess that would be considered voliatility based since it's based on the actual level where a price drop typically steps up buying, and while I'm good with computers, I have a lot to learn about some of the statistics used in technical trading. Based on some basic analysis, for instance, the first level of support on MOT appeared to be a little under 2 percent, but greated than the .5 percent that stopped out, and this mornings price action shows the stops being run. Same with LEH except it was a little more blatant, with the stock spiking down around 10AM then going up well. Looks like there is support just under 3 percent. I'm trading stocks from a pretty high priced newsletter that I have not established confidence in yet, and of course, there is the alternative of trading fewer stocks, less capital or paper trading, but someone else using this info says the gains are pretty consistant but there are a few down days or weeks, and with the hype of a Christmas rally, I wanted to be in, however, other than this speculative portfolio, I'm mostly cash other than a few international ETFs, and some energy and oil service stocks that I though would be hedge against a couple of different scenarios. I'm also trading some energy stocks in the oil service (RIG), coal (BTU), and natural gas (CHK) areas in my swing trading portfolio. These did well today, however the support is lower than I would think because the energy market changes like the weather ! The devil in me is tempted to place tighter stops in these energy stocks to lock in profits, and it's anybody's guess how the markets will react to high NG prices and oil companies increasing exploration money. Maybe I should have sold them into strength near the close, but it seems like there's more upside, however, the reaction is usually the opposite of what I think. I think the cold weather will drive these up, but it all depends what the big money decides to do. As far as time frame goes, I'm in and out pretty often, and too tempted to take a quick profit. For me, a missed loss is better than a missed gain. For three days in a row, gains have disappeared in the afternoon. If I see a good gap up before noon, with the way the market has given back gains later in the day, I might take some off the table. Thanks again... thanks for the backtesting links; I'll check them out.
Thanks agpilot.... previos lows would have worked om MOT but LEH got taken out on a spike. Those devils in the pit. I'm sort of impressed with http://stockconsultant.com, which put me in Nutrisystems for a nice gain. Prophet is good, but it doesn't seem as intuitive to use. Nice site though.